I really like Wellington. It has great potential, more than Auckland, to be an attractive alternative for business and lifestyle. Developing a Tech Hub there would be perfect, as it would have access to government and private sectors. It would be worth the while seeing if a Tech Hub could be established first as an Incubator [and yet also as a Hub for growing business that could contribute to growing others].

You could actively seek to see if this would work by a simple campaign:

1. When you go to Singapore, Suss out who would be interested in Wellington for growing their ideas, suss out MyCube as a possible.

2. Think about an Incubator first, grow from there = if it will take two years for high speed broadband to roll-out in Wellington, then that would be a suitable timeline for developing a Tech Hub – in time for a campaign piece.

2. Research waterfront rents, access to cafes etc and put together a brochure-like eye candy for possible investors or people who might be interested. I know our dollar is attractive (?) for offshore investors. Having something that would help sell – a brochure is always the best way because it is loose and non restrictive, just enough information to get started -especially if you are promoting New Zealand.
Trade NZ might be helpful.

3. Locate and talk to Wellington City Council – Chief Executive or Mayor, but making the right connections with the right people will speed this along – negatives are a time waster.

4. if you are serious about a Tech Hub, then be wary of offshore owned banks. Stay New Zealand (Kiwibank or Taranaki Savings Bank are excellent).

5. If you have this vision and believe in it, then it rightful is yours to own. 

I’m and Aucklander but I do agree with @cddcf3cb8ac155e18d2dfe5b193206b9:disqus in saying that Wellington would be ideal to create a tech hub. It’s size in comparison to Auckland is actually in it’s favour.

One thing that I think you are missing in your equation is the “bringing together” of these groups. That may have happened naturally for places like the Silicon Valley, but for New Zealand there needs to be a concerted effort. Even if it means getting these minds together in the same room.

Getting people like David and Derek from Ponoko, Sam from TradeMe and Rod Drury from Xero in the same room together and seeing what they had to say would be a great step in that direction.

This was pointed out to me by Rowan Simpson on Twitter:

Paul Graham on “How To Be Silicon Valley” – http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

Quite a different take – super interesting!

After reading your article above and Paul Graham’s one, I’m trying to understand how to make a tech hub.
I will not take part of your NZ discussion because I don’t know NZ topography and society at all but I will take one example of what I think is going to be a little tech hub in Europe : Paris, France.

First I completely agree with your three points : infrastructure, capital and media. Even if I think the third is less important.
To take the example of Paris, we have the chance to have an incredible broaband network in France and great local investors like Free founder Xavier Niel or Meetic founder Marc Simoncini.
For the media aspect, the economy focused medias (Les Echos, La Tribune, Le Figaro économie and BFM Business for example) talk a lot about tech companies. But mass media talk less about it.

However, I think you forget one important point cited by Paul Graham : university.

Startup is about innovation and research. It not must be about the latest technology but just about an innovative concept or business model.

Now, the best concentration of innovation and skilled people able to make innovation are in university. The best example is the influence of Stanford in the Silicon Valley. Did the Silicon Valley exist if Stanford was not there ? I think no.

This point is crucial and French investors understand that. This is the reason why they created their own school (Ecole Européenne des Métiers de l’Internet – European School for trades of the Internet).

The second point is people. As @twitter-6356102:disqus said. As a hub, concertation between different people is needed. At Paris, the best investors work together to resolve their problems like the demand of skilled people. One concerted answer to the problem so other investors and entreprenors don’t have to worry about the future because they have a vision which is very important to create a company.

The third point, less important, that cited Paul Graham is the city. Tech hub are in great cities. San Francisco is a good example. NYC and Paris too. And your New Zealander discussion confirmed that.

To conclude, to create a tech hub you need infrastructures, investors, medias, university, people want and one great city. Many of these point can be resolve by the people themselves but government (especially local like mayor) has its own role. The @cddcf3cb8ac155e18d2dfe5b193206b9:disqus ’s advice are very good to see if you can create a tech hub at Wellington.

Hmmm. Interesting and quite well balanced, realistic. A very good piece to get your vision moving. It did for me.

By the way, Sam Morgan is the name I couldn’t remember. He was on Q+A yesterday about the Broadband roll-out! Nice coincidence (are there really such things as coincidences?) 

Interesting – there’s also the deeper cultural frameworks – that American mindset/treatment of failure as a rite of passage/incessant optimism is pretty unparalleled, globally speaking. 

Infrastructure, capital, and media are important; but the core ingredient = quality of the entrepreneurs/talent. You can’t have a sustainable ‘hub’ without a strong talent ecosystem; which is probably why ‘hubs’ are so hard to create – as top talent tends to flow (globally) towards pre-existing hubs.I remember reading this ages ago online, in the comments section of Saul Klein’s post when he started Seedcamp: http://localglobe.blogspot.com/2009/11/seedcamp-thoughts-on-evolution-of.html. Relates to Andry Rabiaza’s point on university – it’s a long comment, but the key sentence is the last one:”The “academics” played a big part in the success story of silicon
valley. And I don’t mean just graduate students (Google, Yahoo, all 4 being PhD
students at Stanford; even Inktomi was a comp sci project at Berkeley) but
rather in the previous decades (60s, 70s). 

The valley can arguably be traced
all the way back to the arrival in Mountain View of William Shockley. Shockley
started in Bell Labs, where he co-invented the transistor and received a nobel
prize for it (so serious scientist). He came to SF to start the Shockley
Semiconductor Lab, and it is from here that 8 of his employees left to become
the Fairchild 8, including Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Eugene Kleiner (yes,
that Kleiner). So here we have a nobel prize winner mentoring folk who then
founded the semiconductor industry (Intel) and key VC firms (Kleiner, Perkins).
So deep intertwining of world-class research and business.

On the PC part of
the stack, you had Xerox PARC, where Bob Taylor convened the most respected
computer science researchers of the 70s to invent modern personal computing.
Taylor had funded most of these guys in the late 60s when he was leading the
ARPA office related to ARPANET (the original internet research project). He
assembled around 200 researchers at PARC, some of which then created many of
the big PC companies we know today:
- Adobe (founded by Warnock and Geschke,
both at PARC, developed Interpress there, then founded Adobe to commercialized
it as Postscript)
- Bob Metcalfe (invented the Ethernet at PARC, then founded
3Com to commercialize it)
- Jim Clark (developed the Geometry Engine chip at
PARC, then founded Silicon Graphics to commercialize it and afterwards founded
Netscape)
- Charles Simonyi (created the Bravo bit-mapped word processor at
PARC, first of its kind, then went to MS to create MS Word and later Excel)
-
Gary Starkweather (inventor of the laser printer, did this at PARC)
- Alvy Ray
Smith (created “digital effects” at PARC, and years later founded
Pixar)

Oh, and of course. Steve Jobs hired many of these guys who built the
Xerox Star and the Alto to create the original Macintosh (my boss at Apple was
the principal UI designer of the Star back in the 70s). Oh, and I shouldn’t
forget another well known PARC alumni, Eric Schmidt (yes, of Google).

What I’m
trying to do here in linking all these $10B-$100B companies in the valley to
the research community, is the depth and vision that these companies had. You
can probably trace around $500B of tech companies back to PARC and Shockley lab
(Adobe, Intel, Pixar, Apple, Google, Yahoo, 3Com). That’s some nice social
return for the nation for its research money! 

And, yes, like you often say, it
often takes 10-20 years to build that foundation in human capital.”

I completely agree with you Andry! And this is precisely the reason why I blog – if I hadn’t written this post, I wouldn’t have discovered Paul Graham’s post, or got this feedback from you and @twitter-6356102:disqus  and @9e24308b6dd9d64cee299988c99d00c4:disqus . 

I feel my original post was quite “closed” in view, and just focussed on the physical things that can be done. But after reading your comments, and the others’, I think the things I discussed are aspects that can accelerate a technology hubs success, rather than create it.

So interesting. Thank you Adele for the historical aspect that I haven’t know since now.

As @mmoorejones:disqus said (and thank you Michael to allow that), it’s so good to exchange on subject like this.

You emphasize on the importance of “academics” and I totally agree as my first comment said.
But when I read this, one thing worry me.

As I read you, the Silicon Valley was built from the concentration of brilliant people (skills & personality) in private labs (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC…) in a few square miles area around two of best university of the world (Stanford and UC Berkeley).

That’s the reality but today, most of the very high skilled engineer, able to emulate the heart of a new tech hub, move to the Silicon Valley so it seems difficult to build something new somewhere else.

Difficult but not impossible. I still think it’s possible to create a tech hub but without being too linked with labs and universities. And the perfect example is NYC. There are awesome universities at NYC: NYU and Columbia to citing the most known. But there are not known for their CS programs.

Contrary to the Silicon Valley, NYC hub is building around multiple start-ups and not from one/two labs. It’s building because some persons have decided to stay there and built. The chance of NYC is not academics (in CS). It’s in finance. NYC is the world capital for finance. And startups can grow there because they find the money needed.

It’s a money driven hub not a lab/university driven. However, the presence of NYU and Columbia stills a good point from where start-ups can find their skilled staffs and reaffirm the importance of academics.

Read this article from TechCrunch about NYC, very interesting :

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/25/ron-conway-new-york-tech-is-here-to-stay/

That Techcrunch article is really interesting – like you said, NYC is growing because of the finance aspect – but whether it’s academia or finance; I think the key thing is to have an older, skilled generation of experts willing to mentor and support younger, emerging entrepreneurs – in an ongoing, collaborative way. Richard Florida writes a lot more about place and I know there’s a lot more literature out there around clusters and creating hubs – but here’s just a short excerpt from one of his books: http://www.creativeclass.com/whos_your_city/excerpt/

Not necessarily directly relevant, but interesting point – which relates to what you said about the highly skilled engineers flocking to pre-existing hubs as opposed to wanting to stick around and create new hubs. But younger talent usually flocks to where the older talent is willing to help them grow. So if we get older generations willing to mentor and support emerging entrepreneurs, I think start-ups emerge from that, and hopefully do well, and in turn, that talent goes on to create even more start-ups, and the cycle continues. But like you said, it comes down to younger talent wanting to stick around – as Richard Florida says:”Despite all the hype over globalization and the “flat world,” place is actually more important to the global economy than ever before.” 

Great stuff michael, excellent nugget to find,
And I think a cool part if it to fill is pulling the community together, telling stories, and doing the legwork to connect and promote the creators.

You’re a driven young guy, who I’ve know for a bit now and rate since oh first walked in the door, I’ve had a crack when I could afford the time at stimulating and promoting the tech community in Wellington with Silicon Welly as a brand, then Start-Up with a magazine and tv series that never quite got over the line financially. In the end, supporting a significant crew and several startups myself, the community building, blogging, PR and story telling had to take a back seat, and I’ve gone into building the businesses quietly behind the scenes and with customers. You’re one of the first kiwi tech blog posts I’ve read in ages in a midnight batch of about 20, so community works!

With all the learnings and a video media biz 90 Seconds, I can play a role in helping and support you and others to make it happen, I’ve just gotta stay focused on turning what I’ve got – a couple a million bucks a year revenue across 2 core businesses in 3 countries into a sustainable global success, that’s my role in the community for now at this stage, would love to back a champion or 3 of the tech community in Welly to turn the heat up, breaks my heart to have dropped silicon Welly and startupTV, would love to see and foster in anyway the new era,

Give me a buzz and keep going hard, community is a very real thing!

It’s very early days and this community will grow one good human at a time,

Kia kaha,
T

Thanks heaps for the comment Tim – hope you’re doing well!

Totally agree that community is a very real thing – hard to find, but we do pretty well with it in NZ :)