ANNALEE SAXENIAN CHRIS DARWALL

Tape 162 163

ANNA LEE SAXENIAN Tape

You know started in the late 70s when was masters student here at

Berkeley and was interested in the San Jose urban area because it was

growing so rapidly wrote masters thesis that predicted that Silicon

Valley would stop growing because the costs of housing were too high the

traffic was too congested labor was too expensive And so firms would

move out think argued that headquarters would stay here but that all

the innovation and growth would occur in places like Austin or Seattle

Of course was completely wrong think once had written that

became quite obsessed with Silicon Valley and trying to understand it

Tartly beª ºTIa grown up in the East Coast around the Route 128

area which was at the time--everybody compared it to Silicon Valley

These were the two high-tech centers Both had their origins in WWII and

both of them were sort-of--had leading University and high-tech

companies around them But having grown up there knew that 128 was

actually quite different And so over the next ten twenty years started

delving into those differences and it culminated in this book that wrote

comparing Silicon Valley and Route 128 And arguing that although they

look on the service to be very similar they are in fact organized very

differently So was of my
reflection
up and
it really experience growing

observing the Route 128 area and then having come and studied Silicon

Valley that kind of led me to want to understand more deeply the

differences between the cultures and the two places

Yah thats good point think the focus of attention has increasingly

shifted from the east to the West Coast and to Silicon Valley because its

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Tape 162 163

been so much more dynamic and so much more adaptive in the current

environment And think that does go back to these differences in the

culture and the firms that are organized in the two Route 128
piacesfi
the industries organized around big companies--and their--most of the

social life and the activity exists within big company say within Deck

what notfWhereas in Silicon Valley the environment--activity spreads

beyond the boundaries of individual companies Theres tremendous

amount of information exchange and socializing that is important to the

business that happens in the community nd the firms also Im sure

youre aware--people move much more ckly between companies So

the labor markets are very open and you find community at the--I

would say at the regional level And its that regional level community

thats think contributed to the dynamism of this placefl

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Tape 162 163

ANNA LEE SAXENIAN Tape 163

Its--its good question I--its historical question

think the main uh difference is that you got set of companies

and models of how to run businesses on the East Coast that were

inherited from earlier businesses and even from the auto industry

and--you know uh the East Coast was sort of the Industrial

Revolution of the U.S And so youve got business model based

around independent companies and peoples careers were to get

job in big company and work their the

way up corporate

hierarchy Silicon Valley you know in the post-war period when

the technology was being developed out here was--it was nowhere

These people were pioneers They were outsiders to the mathst

of American business and American culture and they felt thatway

Al-id so they came to it--these were tech--technoloqy gurs thaiæiy

from the Midwest uh who hung out together and

They came they

were sort of experimenting and they hung out in bars together

and they created culture of sharing information and of h_and

they also experimented with starting new And

companies they

learned very quickly that start-ups were more there

dynamic thfl

was more innovation and more flexibility in these start-ups And

so they tried to reproduce it think sort of increasingly self

consciously tJh they--so they really did create new--new

business model without even knowing it in a--because they were in

new place and dealing with very new technology

Well the first thing to say is if you looked at these two regions
te
from the hard factual point of view you would not see these

differences necessarily What would see is there is MIT in

you

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Boston theres Stanford here And theres big firms Theres

DEC and theres Hewlett Packard and theres start-ups you know

in both places And you wouldnt actually see these differences

that are below the surface So the way that uh came upon them

actually was by going an terviewing people in companies Arid

started that very earl As early as the late 70s trying to

understand how this place worked And what realized very

quickly--and it wasnt what was looking for actually initially--

was that peoples lives were very different here That the

boundary between work and family life for example was much more

blurred here and that people spent tremendous amount of their

time talking about the industry talking about work It was

the air almost here in way that it was not in the East Coast

And in part was informed by having grown up in the East Co

and seen very different environment and knew people that

worked in the high tech industry out there And so understood

how differently their lives were structured And once started

to make those--see those differences intuitively then

structured methodologically to go more systematically and

explore those differences those cultural differences the

differences in the social structures and the way that people uh

organize their work lives

Absolutely mean its very much double edged sword Even uh

for people there mean the people in Silicon Valley are often

extremely driven people who eally want to achieve in tecbnolo

or to make money or whatnot And so they are self-motivatŁdMS

yet they also see the downside to this which is that thŁir_Lfieir

lives are consuned by their work Ub and its very hard driving

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environment Its very competitive And think the ambivalence

that youre expressing is one that uh is real even within the

valley People see that uh they love to be part of the action

They come there to be where the action is And it is where the

action is in technology today And so theres high from that

And theres high from the money thats to be made there On the

other hand the--it has high costs in terms of peoples personal

and
live_9 think uh it also to the outside looks very

diffe than what most of us grew thinking work life would

up

be You would get job and you would have stable work life

and then stable separate fam life And so its that kind of
9-
change is always uh disorienting..
.__fr

Theres certainly there have been ries of studies done say

by the San Jose Mercury News the local newspaper showing high-

very high divorce rates very high rates of drug use and whatnot

And I--its always hard to sort out what is Silicon Valley what

is California what is the 90s tjh but whats true is those

things are uh on the rise here And seem to be associated with

this kind of work life will say on the other hand that

people--there are some people that will strongly defend this and

say that they thrive on not having stable work like the
They

flexibility They like to be able to move from job to job They

like to be able to take time off in between different projects

and that this environment is you know quite dynamic for

the9\A

guess believe that the kind of work organization that you see

Silicon Valley today is going to become more pervasive in other

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places in other--both in other high tech regions but also in

other industries around in the U.S but also around the world

mean you see it--my recent research is on uh the ties being built

between Silicon Valley and Asia And you see say in Taiwan or

in Bangalore India similar kinds of uh tensions in peoples

lives between their work and their family and similar kind of

drive in the workplace Uh so these patterns are diffusing

very quickly v-V

Well the technology certainly permits it in ways that it wasnt

possible before You can be online working all the time You can

have your cell phone and you know it can be--you can be

answering calls all hours of the day or night You can be

developing software and you hand it off to the progranimers in

Bangalore and so youre going 24 hours Theres no question that

technology is allowing it I--I do think that these things are

all subject to human controls So we--it is how we organize it

It doesnt have to be--technology doesnt drive in any essential

sense uh but it does allow it and it has facilitated this speed-

up that were talking about uh tremendously

One of the things that learned in this research is th Silicon

Valley in particular--its the most meritocratic place Ive seen

in the

have
world

dropped out
People come
____
here with no degrees

with their
or you kno

hair
of_school.DPeople come uh you

know in Rasta--they- people can come looking like anything with

any level of language ability and if they can do the ologyj

theyre respected and theyre integrated in very quickly Its-

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 SXENIAN CHRIS DARWALL

Silicon Valley is like sponge for people that have technical

pabilities and ideas Uh and think thats quite uh positive

Thats positive aspect of the Silicon Valley culture uh that you

dont see the same uh kinds of glass for example that

ceilisksy

you see in other parts of American industry as long as can

you

downside of that is that peh that dont have

technical or who cant you know do the reading and writing that

they dont have the basic skills are outside of that economy So
thats the other side--the downside of this economy is that you

to get the education in order to be part of it

Yeah problem solving skills of various sorts You need to be1

able to learn and to learn quickly and adapt quickly

me the first thing to say is that--that genius in general

often as been associated with quirkiness--in--in any field of

endeavor So thats the first thing to say think in the

technology area because of this meritocratic uh aspect there

hasnt been much social pressure to become normal in the

traditional sense and so people uh--their idiosyncracies dont

get sort of ironed out in the way that they might in other

corporate environments for example And in fact think they do

get uh orced in some cases And the media uh sort of

glorifies it and--and uh the novelists do And so there--there

becomes iture that--that uh respects the nerd you know It

has--it does have roots in engineering culture and you know the

MIT--you think about the guys with their slide rules tjh uh but

think that also Silicon Valley has now become that uh

place is

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identif led with being little bit quirky Uh and California in

general
1Lt.Lk\

Thats right Thats absolutely right

Ii
/fflYeah its been very much of boom bust Its very cyclical

i/industry And uh theres certainly uh no straight line to be

drawn in that sense Uh the was driven

early period by defense

spending The early technology was early micro electronics

applied to missiles in aerospace That was in the SQs And then

in the 60s that became commercialized and you got

semiconductor--the sort of development of the semiconductor

industry and the--and eventually the development of the

microprocessor And there was pretty strong growth uh through

the 70s based on that but still not you know much--much

recognition that Silicon Valley even existed outside of the

region Uh and then think in the early 80s--the interesEr

thing is the late 70s was when uh predicted Silicon Valley

would stop growing Thats when the semiconductor industry was

sort of starting to really come to its own The 80s uh then was

when Japan entered the market And in 1985 the cover of Business

Week said that Silicon Valley was going down the tubes They said

it was going to become Japan--uh the Detroit or uh Pittsburgh--uh

follow Detroit or Pittsburgh into industrial decline tJh an

people assumed that the U.S had lost its technology industry and

Silicon Valley was dead Then in the late uh 80s it picked up

again and you saw again huge wave of start-ups Uh this time

around PC5 and--and related technologies lot of the

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components for PC5--disk drives and things like that And then

the 90s the shift has really--the major shift has been towards

software and towards the networking hardware and software and then

the multimedia related uh in--in recent years Uh one of the

interesting things--uh again youve seen cycles throughout that

is that its also expanded Silicon Valley when

eoraphically
started to study it was just small place that extended from

Stanford down to San Jose and all

tJh it was one county Now

you see Silicon Valley extending to the north--really up to parts

of San Francisco and even some people would Mann and to the
say

west uh out into Alameda County and to the south to Santa Cruz

So it keeps expanding geographically too

has happened certainly in the last 20 is that Silicon

years

has begun to suck in highly skilled people from all over

the world Theres no question about that Uh the initial years

it was immigrants from U.S.--from other
the parts of the U.S It

was people from the Midwest uh that came to be of this

part early

industry Uh but as it got reputation and even before it got

world reputation uh it coincided with the fact that the U.S had

changed its immigration laws in the 60s uh to encourage skilled

immigration And so you had large large numbers of Indians and

Chinese for example who were coining to study in the U.S get

masters degrees and Ph.D.s who then got sucked by the Silicon
up

Valley labor market which at that point was just uh continually

you know sucking up labor Uh and so you now see very diverse

labor force Uh and it continues to attract people all over the

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world because its got the--the uh--identification now ound the

world of the place to be if you want to be in technology

Yeah these teams around the globe that are sort of linking in and

out at various times into projects It does look like--and its

certainly pushing what is called the knowledge economy to new

level uh because it is drawing in people with tremendous amount

of skill from all over the world and getting them to collaborate

on this shifting basis on new projects as they emerge It you

know from the point of view of other parts of the world

really pulling places into the economy--world economy--that

afl
historically werent part of it uh into this knowledge economy

du that don So re

insider/outsider that didnt exist in the industrial econ

Right Taiwan Yeah and increasingly youll see this in China

lot Israel Ireland

I--you know dont have good answer for tha But whats
clear is that it has been--a Silicon Valley

very uh dismissive of traditional hierarchies status differences

anything like that Theres just the vir--all virtue lies in

technical capabilities and skills

else has to fall aside from that

of Conversation on Side

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