Continuing on from last time’s discussion of Silicon Valley and the benefits of population density, the logical next step is to talk about one of the side benefits of having so many geeks in one place.

Hot Geek Action!

That’s right, you heard me – hot geek action. Read it again if necessary.

Silicon Valley is quite good at bringing people together. Sure, everyone’s a transplanted workaholic with no social life, but when there’s a chance of getting together to ogle a successful entrepreneur, glean a few tips for success, or grab a glimpse of the future of the tech industry, you have to beat the geeks off with a stick. It’s an insidiously effective positive feedback loop: the people smart enough to run the gauntlet to a liquidity event mold a new generation to follow in their footsteps.

Having a lot of smart people in a region by itself is no guarantee of success – you need to actually gather them together from time to time. You need the members of the population to actually engage with each other, to publicly lick old war wounds, tout their successes, and generally impart wisdom to the general population. Silicon Valley does this very well – any day of the week there’s any number of public events, speeches, meet-ups, featuring people far more successful than you who are willing to tell you how they got where they are today, the mistakes they made along the way, and how you might go about duplicating their success. Half the time, these events are extremely cheap; the other half, they’re free.

While you’re at these get-togethers, you’ll meet another bunch of people who are either exactly like the speaker or, like you, are hoping to be in the speaker’s place in about five years. Things tend to happen.

Now, compare this with the environment in the Lower Mainland.

During my MBA, I was considering joining the Vancouver Board of Trade – until I found out that it would cost $200 to join. This was the student price. In addition, any event that would be worthwhile attending would cost another $40 or so to attend. Talk about a really effective way to kill interest in participation in the community. Comparing this to paying $10 as a non-member of the CSPA and see Jerry Kaplan speak for an hour and a half, or donating $10 to the Computer History Museum to see Steve Case (and mingle with the likes of Woz and Walt Mossberg), I can’t help but feel that organizations in Vancouver are shooting themselves in the foot.

Part of the goal of these industry organizations should be about breaking down communication barriers, and encouraging connections within the business community. That’s how Silicon Valley businesses grow better, faster, and win. And business isn’t the only one that needs to be doing this on an ongoing basis – universities have to be constantly making connections to smooth the transition of technology from the lab to market.

Stanford has this program I just discovered, the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Program. It’s a free class that’s open to the public with the express purpose of bringing together the academic and business communities. It hosts an impressive list of speakers drawn from the local business community. Talk about breaking down barriers! And yet when I suggested bringing together the Engineers and MBA students at UBC for a combination entrepreneurship/engineering project course, all I heard from members of the administration were excuses over how it couldn’t be done because of the differences in tuition fees between the two programs. Lame. Maybe Stanford had that problem, and routed around it by doing it for free as a public service.

This brings me to my next rule for duplicating Silicon Valley’s success:

• Reduce the barriers to bringing people together: Nobody creates a revolution in isolation – get people from all industries, all ages, talking, mingling, sharing, and learning from each other.

Next time: Thinking Big

It’s hard to believe but we’ve been living in Silicon Valley for year. It’s been interesting living in the center of the Technology Universe, and now that I’ve had a bit of exposure to the environment, I think I’ve started to figure out a bit about what makes this place tick. Given my previous internship with the Premier’s Technology Council studying how to make British Columbia a leading technology development centre, I thought it would be useful to compare and contrast Silicon Valley with British Columbia. In particular, I want to see if I can identify the gaps and shortcomings that British Columbia must overcome if it is to be successful in its bid for technology development stardom. I’m going to write up some thoughts on the topic over the next couple weeks. Comments welcome from both BC and Silicon Valley techies.

The Benefits of Population Density

The first thing that struck me about Silicon Valley was that just about everyone was exactly like me. I didn’t have to explain new-fangled technology in conversation to non-techies I encountered – in fact, I’m not even sure such a label can be applied to anyone in the area. People on the street that you might mistake for a refugee from a sixties commune can be overheard casually discussing network routing optimization problems and how to hack commodity consumer electronics goods in order to transform them from lifeless husks into pure, uncut geek street-cred. It’s mind-boggling.

Linus Pauling once said “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” If I could narrow Silicon Valley’s success to one factor, it would have to be this: lots of smart people packed into a contained space. It’s entrepreneurship by Brownian motion – if enough smart people vibrate around Silicon Valley, eventually enough of them will collide and something interesting will happen. And the process is doubly efficient as no one has to waste their time giving background introductions on the technological underpinnings of their idea. It’s a recipe for building cutting-edge companies fast and seeing what works: shake, stir, and strain pure intellectual gold.

Of course, not everyone succeeds and therefore not everyone stays. The circadian cycles of Silicon Valley’s booms and busts leaves the area with the feeling of a transient population. When I first arrived, people always laughed when I used the term “native Californians” – no such creature seems to exist, apparently – everyone here is from somewhere else. However, that’s not to say that the population of the area varies significantly – looking at the California Department of Finance population statistics, the population doesn’t vary as much as you’d expect. In fact, the population is downright steady, especially when you consider the number of people who lost their jobs in the post-dot-com blowout.

That said, I believe part of Silicon Valley’s success is attributable to its machine-like ability to separate the entrepreneurial wheat from the chaff. In some ways, it resembles a casino: people scuttle in, deposit their dreams, and if their dreams don’t pay off, scuttle back to wherever they came from. After all, there’s no way in hell you’re going to be able to afford to live here and afford a home unless you hit a home run (hence Mountain View, the town I live in, is 55% rentals). That kind of churn cleans out the cruft, refreshes the talent pool regularly, and keeps the fresh ideas coming to replenish the pool to form the basis of the next run up the innovation curve.

To summarize, it would appear the first two rules for duplicating Silicon Valley’s success are:

• Get talented people: Create conditions to attract lots of talented people – such as lots of talented people. (Chicken? Egg? You decide!)
• Create conditions that reward the good, or punish the bad: Either one, it doesn’t matter which, as long as the end result is a growing population of talented people who have good ideas and know how to execute on them. The rest you can do without.

Next time: Hot Geek Action!