Tech Nomads of the Universe

Startup center of gravity: Exploring Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has always been the soul of my tech adventures, as I spent a good part of the last two decades there, working and learning and experimenting. Many stories have already been written about the Valley, as a place, as a state of mind, as a catalyst for change and as many other things. Yet, it carries also with it that feeling of perceived insularity and inhospitableness to presumed outsiders. Some call that mix "the good, the bad and the ugly." There are many different ways the Valley distinguishes itself as a place for business innovation: the pay-it- forward culture, the high-risk, high-return gambles, and the ever-present reality of failure and rebirth. But there is no one single lens through which life in the Valley can be read and understood, no easy gloss on the place as a whole, and no one-size-fits-all metaphor. There are as many stories of and about the Valley as there are people who live there.

I have learned a lot from the Valley. In fact, I never stopped learning from it, from the first time I moved there to live on the UC Berkeley campus during my grad school days, and then again when I came back and called Palo Alto home and embarked on my startup adventures. First and foremost there were the many brilliant entrepreneurs I was surrounded with, some having built immensely impactful businesses. I learned from all of them: From the academics I was surrounded with during my AI days at UC Berkeley and business school days at Stanford University. From the venture capitalists we raised capital from, following their footsteps in building technology giants. From those brilliant immigrants from all over the world that came to California aiming to change the world. It was a place where learning was continuous, everywhere, and constant. Most of all, I learned what for me was "the" Silicon Valley: the pay-it-forward culture. I had the chance to experience it first hand when working on my own startups, and then working with all the startup founders I shared some of the journeys with over a couple of decades.

I could certainly picture the Valley through my own lens, but it was always enlightening to experience it through the eyes of others. I reached out to five of my closest friends in the Valley to get their takes: James Shanahan (Jimi), Anurag Maunder, Gopal Dommety, Debashis Basak, and Paddy Ramanathan.

Jimi — Managing risk is key

I first met Jimi in Tokyo in 1994; we were both there to pursue AI and robotics research, a laboratory named LIFE (Laboratory for International Fuzzy Engineering), set up as the leading engineering task force by the most advanced Japanese corporations to advance state of the art in AI. Japan was, as ever, at the forefront of new technologies, and the future was being constructed there that paved the way for many of the innovations and technologies we know and still use today.

Jimi was originally from Ireland and ended up in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s following a few years in Japan and then Europe as an AI researcher, and we reconvened there then, mostly brainstorming ideas around AI and its applications, at a time where the Valley was seeing the first glimpse of what would be an upcoming AI renaissance. We've remained close since, and because we've had a variety of shared experiences, we'd often canvas the state of things in Japan and across Asia, but we always came back to the story of the Valley, as if it had some sort of magnetic pull on us.

I asked Jimi for his thoughts on how innovation was evolving in our world. In a time where things change and goalposts shift so rapidly, having a strong perspective on the evolution of innovation is one secret to wise prognostics.

"Innovation is evolving dramatically with the advent of millennials," Jimi told me. He went on to name several of the buzzwords that represent the powering apparatus that run business as we know it today: app stores, tech incubators and accelerators, shared work spaces, cryptocurrencies, and "Anything as a Service." With so many automated resources to support innovation, Jimi says, "the barriers to innovation and to starting a company have come way down. Time and skills are still the key resources."