I grew up in rural northern Michigan in a village of ~1,500 people. It's the largest municipality in its county, if you can believe it. My senior year of high school was the first year my high school ever offered calculus. The annual unemployment rate in Antrim county for the last three years has been between 12% and 15%.
I've now been in the SF Bay Area for six years and have co-founded three companies: Adonomics, Everlane, and Dev Bootcamp. I'm living on Fantasy Island, but there were plenty of people I went to high school with who would be equally or more capable of doing any of the things I did.
But when you're "inside" a place with a devastated economy, you're understandably myopic. You're asking yourself things like "What do I do if I get sick or get laid off and lose my health insurance? How am I going to afford next month's rent? How will I get my car's heater repaired before winter?" The world of technology is so far outside your realm of experience that the opportunity it might provide doesn't even register.
When people talk about the "bubble" in Silicon Valley, they usually mean a capital bubble. I think the more relevant one is the complete disconnect between how people in the SF Bay Area live (or "the tech industry" more broadly) and the reality experienced by most people outside.
This experience is one of the main things that drove me to help start Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com).
Yes indeed, but it can be dangerous to intellectualize it. Encapsulating what people in that situation experience as "loss aversion" confuses reality for a model of reality, IMO.
I'm not saying you are, but most people I know who talk in those terms forget that. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, the map is not the terrain, etc. etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk_Rapids,_Michigan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antrim_County,_Michigan
Unemployment stats: http://bit.ly/12HtfrM
I've now been in the SF Bay Area for six years and have co-founded three companies: Adonomics, Everlane, and Dev Bootcamp. I'm living on Fantasy Island, but there were plenty of people I went to high school with who would be equally or more capable of doing any of the things I did.
But when you're "inside" a place with a devastated economy, you're understandably myopic. You're asking yourself things like "What do I do if I get sick or get laid off and lose my health insurance? How am I going to afford next month's rent? How will I get my car's heater repaired before winter?" The world of technology is so far outside your realm of experience that the opportunity it might provide doesn't even register.
When people talk about the "bubble" in Silicon Valley, they usually mean a capital bubble. I think the more relevant one is the complete disconnect between how people in the SF Bay Area live (or "the tech industry" more broadly) and the reality experienced by most people outside.
This experience is one of the main things that drove me to help start Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com).