Reflections on a trip to Silicon Valley (1/4)

So here’s a question: if you got the opportunity to visit Silicon Valley, would you take it? For me it was a no-brainer. A few weeks ago colleagues and I got to make a trip to Silicon Valley to experience its innovative culture and inspire our own innovation strategy. Our trip took us to edupreneurs who aim to disrupt corporate development as we know it, to demo days of startup accelerators, to the labs of established and big companies, to a think tank on future disruption, to the birthplace of technology giants such as the famous HP garage, and much more. We took a lot of Uber rides all over the bay area. (Interestingly most of them had only started to drive for Uber a couple of weeks and wouldn’t know any street name if it wasn’t shown on their app. That’s a showcase of the trend for instant and just sufficient skills.) We also saw the Google self-driving car passing us a couple of times.  Above all we found a quite unique culture that relentlessly seeks out inefficiencies, unmatched client needs and disruptions in the current marketplace.  Below are some of my thoughts.

Image: A sign on San Francisco’s Market Street

Thought on the valley

They valley is basically a series of towns that you each may recognize as birth places of former or present ‘biggies’: we saw the garage in Palo Alto where HP was born, the Google self-driving cars around Mountain View, drove through Menlo Park where first Edison had its lab and now Facebook builds a new headquarters, Cupertino where Apple was founded, etc.  

Image: The legendary garage where HP started.

The valley (which includes San Francisco now) has a very strong appeal. As a result you have to be either pretty rich or pretty creative to get by in Silicon Valley … it is a pricey place with hotel rates averaging 300 dollars a night, expensive housing, expensive tuition fees at Stanford or Berkeley universities, and chronic traffic indigestion. As a would-be-enterpreneur you need to weigh that against the unique culture, proximity of disrupters-past, and access to a network of venture capital (yes, there is also some money burning going on, an essential part of innovating through failure.) I wondered how startups can actually afford to operate there. Someone answered me that people tend to get very creative with their housing arrangements and it is not uncommon for a group of let’s say AI specialists to rent a house together and work together.

The culture in the valley has definitely a bias for action and a sharp focus on the customer. They want to let customers decide what is useful, and be ready to scale fast. The latest ‘must read’ book is Lean Startup. The hottest work platform is #slack. The current focus is on applying Artificial Intelligence, big data, Internet-of-Things and biotechnology.

Of course you might wonder if the next disruptions will come from ‘a place’, be it Silicon Valley or another one. Maybe the future of innovation is more distributed than it once was.

(continued in part II)