Silicon Valley has a strong and long-lived reputation as the center of the digital world, with many of the world’s largest tech companies started or based there. But Facebook founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg explained in a recent interview that he would not have moved his company out west knowing what he knows now, according to The Guardian.
Zuckerberg moved to Silicon Valley in 2004, as Facebook was taking shape as a company. He notes that this period bore little resemblance to the party-filled portrayal in The Social Network, but that the area imposed different kinds of pressures.
“It’s still a little short-term focused in a way that bothers me,” Forbes notes from Zuckerberg’s interview. “There’s people who want to start a company not knowing what they want to do, or just to flip it.”
He argues that the pressure for a fast turnaround from investors forces many companies to avoid the long-term planning that ultimately proves essential.
Instead, Zuckerberg suggests he would prefer to have remained in Boston, another focal point of venture capital with a pool of talented young programmers just as strong as that found in Silicon Valley.