The Hot New Tech Cities

6. The proper 'tude. Silicon Valley's most valuable asset is its mind-set, a powerful merging of two behavioral strains: the macho, riverboat-gambler swagger of the original chipmakers who thought nothing of betting the company on a risky new idea, and the gently subversive high-tech idealism of early computer hackers. The resulting intellectual alloy counts you as a sellout if you don't try to make yourself a billionaire.

This attitude is where a lot of Valley wanna-bes, particularly those outside the United States, fall short. But it's hard to overcome centuries of tradition that honor the very qualities that Silicon Valley loathes: aversion to risk, lifelong fealty to an employer, willingness to work within a strict hierarchy. Efforts to grow hothouse tech cities like Sophia-Antipolis in the south of France may lure name companies with tax breaks and get some start-ups going with government development funds--but a tech city can't truly gel without the big-swinging-chip attitude that balloons garage operations into billion-dollar IPOs.

One attitude that's a sure-fire killer is a government bent on controlling the free market of ideas. Singapore, for instance, has had considerable success in building a high-bandwidth infrastructure and raising high-tech employment--as well as questions about its Big Brother reputation. (This is a government that fines people for not flushing public toilets.) Officials insist the rap is undeserved. Internet censorship, says George Yeo, minister of Information and the Arts, is minimal--""for symbolic purposes.'' But for better or worse, it is a symbol--of an obedient, cautious populace. ""It's hard to find examples of imaginative local companies,'' says Bruce Gale, a Singapore-based business consultant.

WHILE TECH CITIES try to emulate the elements of Silicon Valley's success, the ways in which they're not Silicon Valley can also be a virtue. Some potential employees like the idea that compared with the Valley, these other tech cities are not as crowded, and certainly not as expensive to live in. (""The cost of living in the Valley is pornographic,'' says American Electronics Association chief William Archy.) Tech cities also boast that they're not as work-obsessed as the Valley. ""People in Silicon Valley only meet people at work,'' says David Clarke, an exec at Iona, a hot Dublin software house. ""We have lives outside of work, and we intend to keep them.'' Meanwhile, tech-city employers love that their workers generally don't copy the incessant job-jumping of the Valley, where you're in gold-watch territory if you stay at a company for a year.

The paradox, of course, is that the more successful a tech city becomes, the more it develops the Valley's flaws. People in Cambridge, England, and Salt Lake City now grumble about traffic jams and longer commutes. Despite some recent bumps caused by stock-market jitters, real-estate prices have been soaring in Seattle and Cambridge, Mass. And company-jumping is increasingly common in northern Virginia and Dublin, Ireland.

But that's not the only way that tech cities have begun to resemble the Valley. Forget geography: the entire global high-tech culture tends to converge into what venture-capitalist John Doerr calls ""the Silicon Valley state of mind.'' Do people everywhere tend to behave similarly when they stare at computer screens, think digitally and endlessly ponder the value of their stock options? Or is it that, because of the Internet, technoids in places as distant as Tel Aviv and Boise, Idaho, are actually as close to each other as to their compatriots across town? In any case, you could drop a denizen from any tech city into another and he or she would fit in perfectly, down to the chinos, Power Bars and well-thumbed ""Guide to Programming C++.''