[_delirium]

That was about 80% of my impression also. Not 100%, to be sure, but there was a huge pervasive pollution from the "what will the VCs think? how does this advance your career? how will you monetize?" mindset. Everything was dominated by a certain amount of what I might call intellectual strip-mining, rather than intellectual advancement: look for something that was already developed but not yet monetized, and come up with a monetization scheme for it, rather than inventing something genuinely new.

[nickpinkston]

Yea, there's no doubt that's true, but it's true everywhere. The people who are doing novel things are of course everywhere, but the filter is harder.

In SF, you can find a lot of people doing novel things, but you need to filter like anywhere else. It's just that the raw number of creatives here makes these groups larger. I still have yet to find the concentration of these types greater than anywhere else in the world.