A Smiling Town

Nerds Are Lining Up

Paul Graham responded to an email on Friday. Not that big of a deal. What is a big deal is that the articles he shared give San Diego every chance of becoming the tech capital of the world:

Smiling Nerds

From “How to Be Silicon Valley”

What nerds like is the kind of town where people walk around smiling. This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York, where people walk, but not smiling. When I was in grad school in Boston, a friend came to visit from New York. On the subway back from the airport she asked, "Why is everyone smiling?" I looked and they weren't smiling. They just looked like they were compared to the facial expressions she was used to. - Paul Graham

Check. San Diego is sunny and friendly all year round, with a population grateful for the chance to build a life here.

Universities

So if you want to make a silicon valley, you not only need a university, but one of the top handful in the world. It has to be good enough to act as a magnet, drawing the best people from thousands of miles away. And that means it has to stand up to existing magnets like MIT and Stanford. - Paul Graham

UCSD is San Diego's strongest university. It is highly regarded and rated #13 in the nation for Computer Science. It’s not on par with Stanford, MIT, or Berkeley. Yet.

If you managed to recruit, en masse, a significant number of the best young researchers, you could create a first-rate university from nothing overnight. - Paul Graham

If you paid 200 people hiring bonuses of $3 million apiece, you could put together a faculty that would bear comparison with any in the world. And from that point the chain reaction would be self-sustaining. - Paul Graham

UCSD is significantly past nothing. With an influx of money spent precisely, it could leapfrog more prestigious counterparts rapidly.

What’s not in San Diego’s favor?