Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Alyssa Oursler, a freelance writer based in San Francisco covering tech, entrepreneurship and gender, and how those things relate to the big questions. Born and raised in Maryland, she moved permanently out west earlier this year. Here, she explores some of what she’s learned about how the about how the two cities differ in their relationship with the tech and startup world.
I live in San Francisco and sometimes during the normal rounds of introductions at happy hours and parties, I lie and simply tell people that I work in tech. It’s easier, considering everyone in the city seems to.
Just this morning I had coffee with the co-founder and CEO of a local startup – an impressive Stanford alum who started her career at Google – and as we were leaving she told me, “I actually don’t know any other freelance writers here.”
To no longer work in tech (at least directly) makes me some kind of foreign breed, which sums up the main difference between the San Francisco tech scene and the D.C. tech scene I grew up much closer to. While incubators and co-working space are beginning to pop up with more frequency in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding metro area, the entire city of San Francisco serves as one.
For both cities, that contrast is a blessing and a curse.
Incubators breed innovation; throw lots of talented, motivated, like-minded, hard-working people in one area and things will get built. That’s clear here. And it’s not just the startups that have succeeded to point of being the big dogs — Yelp, Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, Salesforce and so on. It’s the friends I have who are whiteboarding out of their living rooms and coding in the equivalent of adult dorm rooms.
Everyone believes they are building the next big something and, to a large degree, being in such an environment is a prerequisite for turning that from soundbite to reality. Then again, the small, tech-obsessed city can quickly turn into something of an echo chamber.
“Incubators breed innovation.”
I bite my tongue as I’m tempted to warn my bootstrapping friends of the dangers of a bubble – and I’m even not talking about valuation. San Francisco is a city obsessed with technology and often obsessed with technology obsessed with convenience. I made that assessment quickly when I first moved and it’s become even more evident each trip back home.
The entrepreneur I met with today agreed that a laser focus on convenience is so embedded in San Francisco’s culture that it’s often hard to see. In such an environment, it’s easy to forget that not everyone in the country or world values or needs the same things. Heck, it’s even true for plenty of folks residing within the 7×7 walls of this city but sitting starkly outside the tech realm and its visions. And it can lead to a gaping canyon between innovation and application.
On the flipside, Washington, D.C. – a city full of art, business, public policy and government – is in many ways much more connected to reality. It’s a similarly small city geographically, and one where entrepreneurs more regularly rub elbows with people whose native tongue isn’t tech jargon, forcing innovation to consider that gaping canyon on a far more regular basis. Many techies have actually migrated straight into government work.
“Policy and innovation are not often neighbors.”
Do you see the Catch-22 coming? Policy and innovation are not often neighbors – and arguably for a reason. The status quo doesn’t generally breed innovation and thus doesn’t attract innovators – a vicious circle evident last time I was in DC. I attended a local startup challenge at 1776 and Maci Peterson of the D.C.-born startup On Second Thought took home the grand prize. Just a few weeks later, she announced that she too is moving to the Bay Area, citing access to funding and talent as the main drivers.
The lesson: Maci (and all of us) need San Francisco’s bubble – its funding, its talent, its beliefs – in order to make big-time breakthroughs. But we also need the rest of the world to remind us how, why and when to use them.
