Chapter 89 Section 2 The Pillars of Silicon Valley

There have been many gathering places of technology companies in the United States and the world.But once a certain or a certain group of large companies starts to decline, the technological development here will gradually fall behind.Early technology companies, such as AT&T and IBM, were concentrated around New York, but after these two companies, there are no companies of this magnitude anymore.Near Boston, especially on both sides of Route 128, there used to be some big companies like DEC and many companies with great development potential. However, as the old companies declined, new companies still could not form a scale.It is difficult for this region to have a big impact on the world's information industry.One reason why Silicon Valley has been able to prosper for half a century is due to the development of the Asia-Pacific economy, and another important reason is that Stanford University has continuously injected new technologies into Silicon Valley.

Many people wonder why Boston, which has Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, can only produce some small companies but not large multinational companies.An important reason is that Stanford University's school-running method is very different from the famous schools in the eastern United States.Instead of simply superimposing the majors of Harvard University and MIT and moving from Boston to California, Stanford established a brand new school based on the conditions in California.As long as you spend a period of time in famous schools such as Stanford University and Harvard and Princeton in the eastern United States at the same time, you can strongly appreciate the huge differences between them.

Among the many differences, the most important is openness.The openness I am talking about here does not mean that the school gates are open 24 hours a day for anyone to come in and out. This requirement is too low.All American universities, including the West Point Army Academy and the Annapolis (Annapolis) Naval Academy, have no walls and allow all visitors to drive in and out freely.The openness I am talking about here means that a university integrates into the local community in all aspects, from teaching to scientific research to life.Whether you live in the idyllic Princeton and Cornell, or the metropolitan Harvard and Columbia, you can clearly feel that you are in an ivory tower.A student does not need any means of transportation, because most of the time they live a life of three points and one line, just like the students in the walls of Chinese universities.And professors are preaching, teaching, dispelling doubts and doing their own research.While living in Stanford, it is difficult for professors and students to feel like being in an ivory tower.

This openness at Stanford is first and foremost a need for survival.Stanford University is geographically far away from the political center of the United States, which has caused its research funding from the government to account for the proportion of the entire school funding far behind that of famous universities in the east.Take the engineering school, for example. Stanford University is about the same size as its old rival, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but the former receives only about half as much government funding as the latter.If readers carefully study the relationship between the geographical location of the top universities in the United States and government funding, they will find that the research funding of a university from the federal government is inversely proportional to its distance from Washington, DC.Government-sponsored research grants are not easy for many professors to apply for.First of all, you have to write a long application report, and then pass the review round by round.During the review process, it takes a lot of effort to do public relations with funding managers and peer reviewers.Applying for funding in the United States is the same as getting money in China, interpersonal relationships are very important.Some professors often invite directors of NSF, DARPA, and the Department of Defense (DOD), which are in charge of funding, to visit the laboratory and participate in their academic reports.It is not easy for these government officials to go to Stanford to listen to a report.In this way, these universities that are close to the government departments will naturally get the moon first.Stanford is far away in California, of course it is a disadvantage.Therefore, some professors at Stanford who have been put on tenure and have no shortage of funds did not even bother to write applications later.

As a university professor, it is of course gratifying to receive a large amount of research funding from the government.Taking government funding has many advantages over getting funding from industry.First of all, generally speaking, the funding intensity of the US government is relatively high, and governments of all countries are the same on this point, so there is no need for special explanation.When receiving scientific research funding from the US government, unless it is a special project such as the development of the Hubble Astronomical Telescope, it is seldom necessary to make a specific system. It only needs to conduct method research and submit a research report at the end.There is a big difference between the U.S. government and the Chinese government on this point, and it is much easier to account for research funding from the U.S. government.For example, in the research of speech recognition, in China, a large amount of funding from 863 was used to build a recognition system, but in the United States, it is only necessary to use a computer to implement its own algorithm and prove that it is effective.Few professors have actually developed a speech recognition system like Dr. Kai-Fu Lee. (There has never been a Chinese scientific research appraisal association in the United States.) It is very reasonable for government scientific research authorities such as NSF and DARPA to do so. It saves professors a lot of time and energy in making demonstration systems, allowing scientists to focus on Focus entirely on the research itself.This is the reason why the United States has been able to lead the world in science and technology for a long time, and the reason why people win the Nobel Prize almost every year.Undoubtedly, many university professors are happy to accept such a project. They can not only focus on their studies, publish more papers, but also have a stable source of income. (Professors in American universities have to pay their three-month summer vacation salary from their own scientific research funds.) Some professors who have been famous for a long time and have great influence can easily get long-term and large-scale government contracts. This is the case with the famous speech recognition and natural language processing expert Professor Jalinik mentioned last time. His funding is often the sum of the funding of other professors in the department.Over time, they and the government have become extremely dependent on each other, shutting themselves in an ivory tower.

However, there may be disadvantages in everything that has advantages.The US government's NSF and DARPA and other scientific research funds generally fund basic research projects that the industry is unwilling to support, such as many projects in basic science, life science and material science.These research topics are unlikely to produce any commercial value in the short term, and some may never have commercial value. It is very necessary for the long-term development of a country to fund these projects with government money.Once a project has commercial value and can be funded by companies, the government will gradually reduce and eventually stop funding for these topics, because the government (representative of taxpayers) believes that there is no need to do duplicate things with industry, let alone Necessary to compete with industry.On this point, the US government and the Chinese government are very different from the Japanese government.For example, the US government has almost no funding for search technology research, because it is a technology that has already begun to make profits.A few weeks ago, I received a Chinese government delegation to visit Google. During the final question time, an official asked whether the United States would give support and care to high-tech companies like Google in terms of policies and funds. The Google vice president present answered , she felt that Google, as a very profitable company, neither should nor needed to get special attention from the government.The ones that need government help are small and not easily profitable companies, such as solar companies.

Even in engineering, government-funded research projects are often so cutting-edge and have so narrow a range of possible applications that they sometimes publish papers that few people actually want to read, let alone make commercial sense.Professor Jalinek satirizes this phenomenon as "no one will read these papers except the reviewers of the papers".The United States is very strict with the management of government research funds. It is strictly forbidden to use funds from one project to fund other research projects. Even if there is a surplus of funds, it is impossible for professors to use it to study topics with practical application significance.As a result, professors who have received enough government funding usually do not research applied topics, let alone start their own companies.Over time, a noble atmosphere has been created in the famous universities in the eastern United States. Everyone compares who gets more government funding, who publishes more research papers, and whose research results are of higher theoretical level.The way professors do things directly affects their students.Doctoral students in these schools do experiments and write papers while in school, and then work as professors or researchers in laboratories of large companies after graduation.The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University have the best electrical engineering and computer departments in the United States, but the proportion of PhD graduates who are professors in MIT is much higher than that of Stanford.From the point of view of learning, this is completely correct, but this kind of research is not very helpful for entrepreneurship.

It is not surprising that Stanford University is far from the federal government and receives relatively less funding from the government than the elite schools in the East.However, Stanford University guards Silicon Valley, and the money it takes from the industry is many times more than any eastern university of the same size.Generally speaking, the intensity of taking money from companies is not as strong as that of the government, and there are many specific things to do.Some corporate-backed research projects can't even publish high-quality papers.That's why many well-funded professors at prestigious universities in the eastern United States disdain to deal with industry.

However, the benefits of taking money from industry are also many.The most obvious benefit is that both the professors and their students can exercise their ability to solve practical problems through projects in the industry.Any reader who has taken over a company project with a mentor will have an experience of this.In this way, with the money from the industry, Stanford has trained and trained many technical all-rounders, who have been trained from designing and implementing a product to project management.But if it is only this benefit, it is nothing more than training young people who might have been professors into senior engineers and technical executives, rather than industrial leaders and entrepreneurs.In fact, the biggest benefit of keeping in touch with the industry and doing research for the industry is that you can see the direction of industry development and find new opportunities for entrepreneurship.This potential benefit is even more pronounced for young students than for senior professors, because young people are more willing to try.Although the United States has done a little better than other countries in transforming science and technology into products, there is still an obvious disconnect between industry and academia. When it comes to questions, there is no answer, and the teachers and students of Stanford University who can closely connect the two ends often play an important role as a bridge.There are many examples of this at Stanford. For example, the development of Cisco's early routers is a topic with strong engineering but weak academic nature. MIT generally does not touch this topic.However, general network equipment manufacturing companies will not use their brains to invent a general-purpose router because they are limited to existing products, so the opportunity for Posak and Lerner came. They invented a general-purpose router, and therefore And founded Cisco.Another example is the invention and application of DSL is also a good example.Although the encoding method used for DSL was invented by Bell Labs long ago, everyone just published a few papers to formulate some standards.At the same time, manufacturers of modems in the industry are still struggling to increase the transmission rate from 14.4K to 28.8K, and they themselves cannot achieve qualitative improvement.John Chaffee, who had worked at Bell Labs and was a young assistant professor at Stanford at the time, saw the opportunity and jumped at it.Chaffee, who later became the youngest academician of the American Academy of Engineering, was already a world-class expert in channel coding at that time. He had a higher theoretical level than any researcher in the industry. Professors are more capable of doing practical things.In theory, Chaffee perfected the DSL coding method and turned it into an international standard. At the same time, Professor Chaffee led his students to set up Avanta Company, which truly realized the cross-age era of DSL replacing dial-up Internet access. change.

There are many examples of this at Stanford University.The university is very understanding and supportive of professors running companies.As long as a professor can complete the teaching task and publish enough decent papers, Stanford does not restrict its professors to work part-time in outside companies, or even leave the school full-time for a period of time to start a company or hold an important position in the company.Stanford University President John Hennessy himself is a prime example.After he invented the Reduced Instruction Set (RISC) processor MIPS in the 1980s, he co-founded MIPS Corporation.In the following years, he will focus on running the company, rather than teaching and doing research at Stanford.A few years later, MIPS was listed on NASDAQ and later sold to its largest customer, SGI Corporation.Hennessy himself was withdrawn from the industry and returned to Stanford to serve as the dean of the School of Engineering.After a career in the industry, Hennessy has become a rare management talent.A few years later, he began serving as Stanford's president until today.Today, Hennessy remains on the boards of Google, Cisco and another public company, Atheros.

The real meaning of an open campus is to integrate the university into society, as Stanford did.Openness is the "base" of Stanford, while the integration of factories and schools is its "use".The latter guarantees the concrete implementation of the university's open campus. Many good engineering universities in North America, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Waterloo in Canada, emphasize the combination of factories and schools.In order to allow students to gain knowledge in the industry, MIT has established a joint student training program (program) with large companies such as AT&T. Students who enter the program have to work at AT&T for one year (four summer vacations) in return for AT&T To pay the student's tuition, many universities in the United States have programs similar to scholarships.This is of course a good thing for students entering these training programs. It not only solves the problem of expensive tuition fees (Note: American private university tuition fees are unaffordable for middle-income families), but also gets good industrial work experience. In the future, whether it is going to the industry or continuing to study for graduate students, it will be of great benefit.However, this loosely coupled combination does not directly help universities or companies very much.The main advantage for the school is that the big company has funded some students for it, and at the same time, it has undertaken part of the vocational education obligations for it. However, the topics that the students do in the company usually have nothing to do with the school. This kind of cooperation is very important for the school. Research help is very limited.For the company, although there are favorable conditions for preferentially selecting outstanding students from prestigious schools, and these students will enter the role a little faster than their peers after working.However, these students, mostly undergraduates, do not necessarily have to work for the companies that sponsor them after graduation.During the internship, it is impossible for them to bring any new ideas and technologies to the company. The combination of factories and schools in Stanford and Silicon Valley is much more than that of MIT.Stanford has directly helped Silicon Valley companies not only in technology, but also in the cultivation of talents.The technical help is reflected in the fact that a large number of excellent professors directly go to Silicon Valley companies to work and study the scientific research projects of these companies, as we have already introduced.The help in talents is firstly reflected in the fact that the university has been providing continuing education for technical and management talents of various companies in Silicon Valley.Most engineers in Silicon Valley companies do not have a master's degree, and many find that their professional level needs to be improved at work. Stanford University provides a very convenient training program for these people. They can take one or two postgraduate courses at the university every semester. In this way, a master's degree can be obtained in three to five years, and some people even use their spare time to study for a doctorate at Stanford while working full-time in the company.Although sometimes it takes ten or eight years to study for a doctorate, it is a good way to obtain a doctorate under full-time working conditions after all.Of course, if someone does not want to take a degree and only wants to take one or two courses, it is also possible.Silicon Valley companies are well aware of the importance of vocational training, and generally encourage employees to pursue higher degrees in terms of time and money.In order to facilitate Silicon Valley employees to take courses, Stanford University has a good distance education network.Students do not have to go to class to attend lectures, they can attend classes in front of the TV at home.Almost all of Stanford's courses are broadcast live to the campus and Silicon Valley via cable TV, and its own students don't have to go to the classroom.Many people learn well without stepping into the classroom for a semester.In case there is a conflict between class time and work, working students can go to the library to borrow course video tutorials after class.I don't know of any other university in the world that provides such convenient vocational education opportunities for employees of surrounding companies. It is usually easier for Silicon Valley employees who are studying for PhDs at Stanford to find meaningful research topics than students who have just graduated from undergraduates. On the one hand, they have industry experience and know which topics will be of great help to them in the future. Their economic foundation does not need to rely on the professor's stipend to live, and they value the research direction and level of the professor more than the money in their hands. (For fresh graduates who have no money, they often have to sacrifice their interests in order to win scholarships.) Doctoral students from all over the world are facing the same problem. The topics that have been studied for four to five years or even longer may not be useful after graduation. , because doctoral students do not have the freedom to choose topics, and sometimes they do not understand the society outside the school too much.This problem generally does not exist for PhD students who have worked in Silicon Valley.This makes the effect of Stanford's senior talent training very good. Stanford University has also trained many management talents for Silicon Valley and industry.Stanford Business School, which has eight Nobel Prize winners, is as famous as Harvard Business School in the United States.Many outstanding young people in Silicon Valley go there to recharge after working in the company for a period of time.In order to make it easier for the executives of companies with a lot of money to go to the business school to study for MBA degrees, Stanford not only has general MBA courses, but also provides EMBA courses specially for company executives. Of course, getting any degree from Stanford is not an easy task.There is a saying in the United States, "Harvard is hard to get into, Massachusetts is hard to get out."In fact, Stanford University is both difficult to enter and difficult to exit. It has always adopted a strict approach to students.Some people think that as long as you donate a large sum of money to Stanford, you can "mix" into the school. This idea is completely wrong.Because Stanford is not short of money, and will not smash its own brand for money. (Harvard and other universities also prevent students who do not meet the requirements from enrolling.) According to the data published on the official website of Stanford University, the four-year graduation rate of its undergraduates is only about 75%, and even in the sixth year, the graduation rate is only 95%. .That is to say, one in four students cannot complete an undergraduate degree within four years, and 5% of Stanford undergraduates fail to obtain a degree in the end.This elimination rate is much higher than that of the best universities in China.The elimination rate of Stanford's doctoral students is even higher. Many people have to leave with a master's degree after several years of study because they cannot pass the Qualification Exam.Take its electrical engineering department as an example, about half of the students are passed the qualifying exam every year, and of course everyone has two chances. In addition to providing technical support and cultivating talents for Silicon Valley, Stanford has made great contributions to helping Silicon Valley transform.Before the 1980s, the pillar industry in Silicon Valley was semiconductors.Since the 1980s, Cisco, Sun, and SGI (Sun's main competitors in the 1990s) bred from Stanford have promoted the transformation of the entire Silicon Valley from semiconductors to hardware systems.At the end of the 1990s, Yahoo and Google, which were born in Stanford, and countless small Internet companies set off a boom in the Internet and realized another transformation of Silicon Valley.Today, some of Stanford's new technologies in energy, materials, etc. are helping to establish an industry of new renewable energy such as solar energy, which may be bigger than the Internet. On the one hand, Stanford University drives the regional economy; on the other hand, it is the biggest beneficiary of the rise of Silicon Valley.Silicon Valley companies provide Stanford with huge research grants and donations.Historically, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Sun, and Google have all been Stanford sponsors.Only Hewitt, the founder of Hewlett-Packard, donated a huge sum of 400 million US dollars to Stanford in 2001, which is the largest donation to an educational institution in the world so far. In 2005, Stanford received more donations than its old rival Harvard University for the first time, thanks entirely to Google's founders and employees.Stanford has benefited from Silicon Valley far beyond financially.Due to the development of Silicon Valley, the employment rate of Stanford University students has become the highest in the United States. Many outstanding students choose Stanford University just because of the convenience of finding a job.Staying in Silicon Valley naturally has unique opportunities for entrepreneurship and cooperation with industry, which is why some outstanding professors choose Stanford.It was the rise of Silicon Valley that made Stanford University leap from a regional university after World War II to a first-class university in the United States, and then to become one of the best universities in the world. The research topics funded by the government are not only biased toward theoretical research, but the research direction may not have great prospects.University professors seem to be free and unrestrained, and can research topics they are interested in, unlike people in companies who are tied to tasks assigned by their superiors.But because there is no funding, it is absolutely impossible, so university professors revolve around funding every day, and they have to apply for some projects if the government has any funding.At an academic symposium held in Europe a few years ago, experts from various countries spoke freely on the future research direction in this field. Professor Jalinek was impatient and said, "You are wasting time arguing here, isn't it? You can do whatever the government gives you money for.” This is a fact that people don’t like to admit, but it is indeed the reality.After 2000, computer science entered a low ebb in the United States, and many computer scientists switched to biostatistics and bioinformatics.Now, a large number of doctoral students who study biostatistics have graduated, but there is not much demand for biostatistics in academia and industry. Many doctoral students will not be able to find jobs for a long time.This is an unavoidable problem of government planning.