THE NAME
"I live in a nice apartment in the heart of Palo Alto, in a beige building, just five minutes walk from the garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded HP in 1939, and gave the starting point for what today is Silicon Valley.
Jerry Yang previously lived in the apartment that I now live in, well before he founded Yahoo and became a billionaire. Jerry is originally from Taiwan, but his mother moved to San Jose and began working as an English teacher for other Chinese immigrants when he was 10. Today Jerry Yang lives in a villa in Los Altos a couple of miles from here.
Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, PayPal, and SpaceX, used to live two floors below my apartment.
Jonas, along with his Swedish family, live on my floor. Jonas is a software engineer from Gothenburg. He has not founded anything (yet) but is another testimony of the melting pot that is Silicon Valley. I invited most of the residents for gløgg at Christmas, and most recently met them all, as we spent a couple of hours together on a nice night because the property was evacuated due to a (false) fire alarm. The residents were gathered on the sidewalk in front of the building for a night's talk about everything from artificial intelligence and big data to the local basketball team, Warriors, who everyone cheers for, and the new president.
Kumar, a software engineer at Facebook, we mostly see when he patiently negotiates his little son out of the car in the parking basement. Our neighbor’s son Zack, we generally see with a seemingly endless series of smiling nannies, bringing him to and from school, while his Stanford MBA parents toil for two of the local tech giants. The Chinese Product Manager for a successful startup, who has placed a huge Christmas star on her door all year long, always laughs loudly when I meet her in the elevator very early in the morning on my way to work. It is all sharply supervised by the self-proclaimed apartment-police, made up of a benign elderly lady in the corner apartment on the second floor, who apparently sees everything. An open, kind-minded, highly educated and privileged global ghetto in my small section of the world.
There are many reasons why Silicon Valley is the world's most dynamic innovation machine.
Here you find some of the world's best universities, with the elite universities Stanford and Berkeley in the lead. It is is the world's most complete financing environment around Sand Hill Road with investors, who all have direct hands-on experience from starting a business. And it is a string of the world's largest and most innovative tech companies with Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Uber and a number of others at the forefront. All of the startup companies continue to develop at hyper speed, with new and disruptive solutions, and are ready to buy the best of the new startup companies that are continuing to search for Silicon Valley.
Crucial is the special spirit with a focus on openness, curiosity and acceptance of risk. But Silicon Valley's innovation machine would soon die if it was not for a steady influx of some of the best brains from around the world.
The figures speak their clear language: 51 percent of the so-called Unicorn companies are founded by migrants or have a foreigner as co-founder.
Unicorns, are privately owned startup that have reached a value of more than one billion dollars. There are companies like SpaceX, Uber, Palantir, and Airbnb.
One third of the US startup companies established between 2006 and 2012, which went on the stock exchange, were founded by immigrants.
Migrants, at the same time, form a crucial part of the highly skilled workforce in the companies.
Around 71 percent of the engineers and key people in Silicon Valley's IT companies are migrants or foreigners.
First and foremost, Indians and Chinese, but the whole world, including Denmark, is well represented. Silicon Valley may be geographically located on the west coast of the United States, but at the same time it is a picture of the opportunities and wealth of globalization.
Of course, it is also the explanation that Silicon Valley's major technology companies spend a lot of time in Washington DC and that they actively follow the discussion of visas and entry in the wake of the Administration's goal of reducing influx of foreign labor. They are completely dependent on the continued free influx of highly skilled labor in order to grow and develop.
The numbers are closely linked to another distinctive feature of Silicon Valley. Cognitive diversity is important for the dynamics of the innovation environment. The ability to network and work across professional groups is crucial. It is well documented. In a study from Berkeley comparing research communities in the Boston area with Silicon Valley.
The universities of Boston are professionally as abundant as the universities of Silicon Valley. But Harvard and MIT do not harvest quite as many startups and spinouts as Silicon Valley. The difference between the Boston area and Silicon Valley is the ability of Silicon Valley to network across professions and faculties. Silicon Valley's open, curious network-based working method strengthens the innovative power and ability to see opportunities and solutions.
If we want to maintain the ability to innovate needed to create new solutions and businesses, cognitive diversity and the ability to involve multiple profiles and views is important. Elon, Jerry and Jonas are good examples of this. They surround themselves with some of the world's best talents, and they are all part of mixed teams that can challenge, get ideas and create new disruptive solutions, precisely because of their diversity.
New ideas are best created and developed in environments where opposing viewpoints are broken and challenged. That is not new, but it's hard in practice. Therefore, it is important that different profiles are represented on the board, in the development department and the companies in general. Silicon Valley shows as a clear illustration of the potential of globalization that it is in diversity that ideas arise and evolve.
Here's my great grandfather on his bike. Tyres from Codan Gummi.
And here's the history of Codan Gummi:
And this is the original patent: