In more established field it tends to be that people outside the field exaggerate things because the can't put them into the context of the field i.e. they lack domain knowledge. In "tech" it seem like it's the people in the field that exaggerate things because they can't put them into the context of the world.
"I wonder if the increase of size of seed round corresponds to startups waiting to seek funding until they are more mature."
Yes, but I don't think it's so much that they wait as that there's more competition. People are, in a sense, working longer on their application for funding and since they are further along (and cost have risen in general) they need more money.
Maybe, I think the thing with that quote is that it's not always technology that is missing for things to get distributed. Technology, or affordable technology, has been missing for many things so far, but also organization. And I would say that the latter is increasingly the case, since technology is developing faster than we can make use of it. Last years smart phone processor is almost already obsolete, but it's a supercomputer for anything else.
I think the things that are going to get distributed in the next decade have already been invented and are just waiting to get organized. Much like the dotcom boom for that matter. Shopping online? So silly! People say that software is eating the world, but it's more like that software and the world is struggling to catch up with the opportunities provided by hardware.
It's weird that people who claim unpopular opinions, often at the expense of others, so rarely can find the time to argue their excellent ideas. I have a number of friends that works in "IT" in Europe. The difference between working for a US and European "IT" company is night and day. It simply has very little status as a field in the US. If you had ever seen the things a systems administrators have to deal with from highly educated engineers, you would know that it has less to do with "IQ" and everything to do with domain knowledge.
"I'd call that a big negative externality to the accessibility of loans for higher education."
That's only one side of it though. The other being the expectations discussed in the article. You see this quite clearly in housing markets where the price is dictated by the profile of who's going to live there and when they are expected to pay off the loan. A house with an expected 100 year loan in a professional market is of course much more expensive than a 30 year loan in a worker market. For what could be more or less the exact same thing.
Web technologies only works when the interface is the primary feature. Spotify is a music player, Steam is a game launcher. There isn't that much functionality under the hood. On the other hand if you only need performance, or functionality, something like Qt works. What's hard with "applications for professionals" is that you need both. I doubt Adobe mainly uses web technologies in their creative suite.
Not entirely sure what your point is. The best solution is of course to provide African American communities with good schools from the beginning. Like many other ethnic groups Asian Americans have been free to implement their own communities, largely based on family ties, because they weren't brought to the US in chains.
Eh, considering that much of the social pressure of Chinese society presumably stem from a lack of cultural diversity, I would very much be bothered never seeing anyone outside my ethnic group if I'd grown up in China. I'd probably want to move anywhere else just for that fact.
As far as I know that only tells you why it might have had to be Dallas at some point when regional centers made sense. Which changed somewhere around Paypal if not earlier.
I'm not saying that Dallas (or any other city) can't have some, even quite successful, startups. Just that you can't really compete being say "the third to fifth best choice for startups". At that point you're competing with too(!) many different cities. You have to be the obvious choice in a few, preferably large, categories; capture a lot of local talent (which is harder in the US), and most likely both.
"Especially for information technology, I don't understand the rationale why it has to be concentrated at certain places."
It's concentrated _because_ it doesn't have to be at certain places. Your post office that had to be close to you is now run by a couple of thousand people at Google.
"Why can't a successful startup not be in Dallas, Amarillo, Miami or Des Moines?"
Again, without being to annoying, why does it have to be in Dallas? It doesn't, so it mostly isn't.
That's the point everyone else is making, yet conanbatt keeps coming back to comparing salaries between Berlin and San Francisco as an example of higher salaries in the US. Berlin is not even the highest paying city in Germany, let alone Europe.
In more established field it tends to be that people outside the field exaggerate things because the can't put them into the context of the field i.e. they lack domain knowledge. In "tech" it seem like it's the people in the field that exaggerate things because they can't put them into the context of the world.