How American are Startups?

At Xtech Paul Graham’s keynote talked about wether silicon valley’s success could be duplicated, some of the content was questioned by a few people and Tom Coates has a good analysis with some more interesting opinions in the comments. Certainly some good directions to think about for Montréal.

I think an aspect that is often overlooked in their “woohoo we’re so great around here” rethoric is the heavy impact of military spending (mentioned in the comments), a good number of the prerequisites Graham mentions are results of gov. military moneys from decades ago.