Mark Zuckerberg has advised budding entrepreneurs not to follow his footsteps in moving to Silicon Valley to launch their startups.
In an interview at a conference in Utah on 31st January 2020, the Facebook CEO said he wouldn’t launch a start-up in Silicon Valley. The San Francisco Bay Area is the tech capital of the United States, and it is home to the likes of Apple, Google, and Facebook itself.
“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,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg said, when he first moved to Silicon Valley, he was 19 years old, and “didn’t know anything about building a company,” and “at the time a lot of the tools for building a company weren’t as built out as they are now.”
He said social media now makes it easier for a new company to get its customers. Adding that powering a new app or website with servers is just a matter of renting capacity from the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.
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“Back then it was a lot more complicated,” he said.
Zuckerberg explained that it was difficult for Facebook to get the servers and data centers it needed to establish itself. He also said finding the necessary venture capital was harder due to the downturn in the tech sector following the dot-com bust.
Zuckerberg says it is now easier to go outside Silicon Valley
He had no choice but to come to Silicon Valley to find solutions to all those problems. He opened up that “it really felt like it was going to be impossible.”
“I think the world is in a different place now,” Zuckerberg said. He added, “I think the infrastructure exists for people to do stuff like this in more places.”
Zuckerberg says not only is it easier to go outside Silicon Valley, but there are also upsides to doing so.
“There’s a lot of advantages to building a company that is not in such a monoculture,” he said.
Zuckerberg is not the only tech exec to doubt the future of Silicon Valley as the tech hub of the world. In 2019, Reddit cofounder and investor, Alexis Ohanian also said: “no one in their right mind” would launch a new startup entirely in San Francisco. His reasons were the region’s high cost of living as a major hindrance to doing business and recruiting talent.
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