Embrace that we need Silicon Valley, but we also don't really.
The world is a petri dish for innovation and we should be actively learning from it to create the life we want to lead.
Silicon Valley has an Invisible Hold on us
This week, there has been a lot of public conversation about the state of San Francisco as an innovation ecosystem - with shutdowns due to the coronavirus, and work from home orders driving many to move elsewhere (for sanity, but also because they can).
Silicon Valley has an almost religious vortex which reminds me of the grasp that investment banking careers had on undergraduates in the late 90s. Where you didn’t question why, but you knew it took you on the golden path where you could retire and do what you really wanted.
Millions flocked to Silicon Valley where the default reason for its existence is the legend story that by being there you were better of, you come for the belief system, and acceptance, then stay for investment, the community and ultimately scaling and massive wealth creation. The pursuit of this legend story has made for huge fortunes, and also huge damage to the mental and physical health of generations who have sacrificed many years of their human experience to pursuing this dream often with many negative repercussions socially and mentally. In a geographically constrained world these physical centers of excellence made sense, and physical centers of excellence still do..expect this is fanning out around the world.
Regional Centers of Excellence will Replicate and Build Upon “Silicon Valley” as a Design Pattern.
The export of Silicon Valley is refreshing as as long as tech centers of note (like Bangalore, Shanghai, London, Berlin etc) provide the ingredients of nurture required to create their own regional vortexes. With remote work and communications increasing the concentric circle of influence of these regional powerhouses to everything within a 12 hour plane ride, we will see Silicon Valley move from being a mindset, to being a design pattern of innovation not just a religious artifact.
This design pattern needs a few key ingredients to manifest, to the vision that we only need the pattern of silicon valley, but we don’t have to be there to succeed.
1) Talent needs to want to live there: Remote work’s boom will be more places that you can both live in, and work in to fulfill your ambition, unlocking many new regional hubs, and intersecting the life you want to lead, the environment you want to be in and the self actualization that Abraham Maslow wanted when he imagined his iconic pyramid of human needs. Not just young talent but experienced talent too, to make the rules, break rules and to maintain them.
2) Capital needs to support every stage from birth to adulthood, and death: Both conviction driven and follower driven, from the smallest of drops of a few hundred thousand to quit your job and get going to the huge wads of growth capital, and visionary SPACs driven to generate liquidity to get the cycle going, every regional power needs its full spectrum of capital to balance out.
3) Legends need to be cultivated and spread through word of mouth: From the Traitorous Eight (who left Shockly semiconductor to start FairChild Semiconductor) to Larry & Sergey, and Steve & Woz, the art of the legend story and the heroes journey was perfected by Silicon Valley. The rest of the world needs to take note. Tell those legends through the generations.
4) Attitudes need to be positive, encouraging and forgiving: Silicon Valley’s religious ideals, of experimenting, failing and iterating, persisting, picking oneself back, learning the lessons and eventually striking gold allows for a long term memory of failure to be erased, inn place of positive and encouraging persistence. Its evolution and healing for the emotional state to go against the odds and (re)invent again and again.
I believe that when we set ourselves free that we need to physically only be in Silicon Valley, that we will transcend into a new era of permissionless creation leading to actually fulfilling the real gap that exists between human need for technology and what we can create.