Guy Kawasaki's wonderful post on how to start your own silicon valley hit home for me. Here are some of my favorite points he made, with my thoughts appended:

Stuff you need:

"High housing prices. If houses are cheap, it means that young people can buy housing sooner and have kids. When they have kids, they can’t take as much risk and don’t have as much energy to start companies."

I have ALWAYS thought the reverse was true, that an affordable landscape housing-wise was the best way to foster innovation because the barriers to entry weren't so high. But his point is well taken - if the barriers to comfort are high, then people will work hard to get comfortable.

"Life-threatening enemies. Israel is a speck of dust that has few natural resources, and it’s surrounded by real enemies. And yet the country has produced some of the world’s best technology companies. There’s nothing like a life-threatening environment to get the entrepreneurial juices flowing, I guess."

Risk is a key component to success, sure, but let's not underestimate the effect of "battle fatigue" on an otherwise innovative population. Also, lets focus on causality too: innovation occurs in Israel but we don't see much of it from Lebanon or Iraq.

"Focus on educating engineers. The most important thing you can do is establish a world-class school of engineering. Engineering schools beget engineers. Engineers beget ideas. And ideas beget companies. End of discussion. If I had to point to the single biggest reason for Silicon Valley’s existence, it would be Stanford University—specifically, the School of Engineering. Business schools are not of primary importance because MBAs seldom sit around discussing how to change the world with great products."

There are many great engineering schools that haven't fostered this innovative spirit though, and what are some reasons for that? Also, I immediately wonder what a great art or design school might be able to foster. Is it only engineering?

"Encourage immigration. I am a third-generation Japanese American. My family moved here to drive a taxi and clean white people’s homes. If I had a choice between funding someone from a family who moved here from Vietnam whose father and mother run a 7-Eleven versus a descendant of a Mayflower passenger with “IV” in his name, I’ll give you half a guess as to my preference. You need to encourage smart, hungry, and aggressive people to immigrate from around the world. And to do that, you need good schools."

Completely true. There are hungry people all around, people who yearn to build and build big, and as a society we would be damn fools not to scream "build here! please!"

"Celebrate your heroes. Every region needs its heroes. These folks take role modeling to an extreme; they have names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Steve Case, Anita Roddick, and Oprah Winfrey."

We have a hero wall here at the idfive office. It isn't big enough, but maybe someday it will be.

"Forgive your failures. There is no better place to fail in the world than in Silicon Valley. (Where else can you get your clock cleaned by Microsoft and become a venture capitalist and top-ranked blogger?) Indeed, some people here have made a career of failing. Some of this is cultural—failing in Europe or Asia casts a cloud over one’s family for generations. Not in Silicon Valley. Here, it doesn’t matter (within reason) how many times you fail as long as you eventually succeed. So many entrepreneurs who failed went on to create massive successes that we’ve learned that failure is a poor predictor of future results."


I am very big on failure as a learning tool, I think the greatest gift for any kind of builder or creative person is a hefty dose of error tolerance meshed with patience and optimism.


Guy Kawasaki does a great job of telling us how to start our own silicon valley: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/how_to_kick_sil.html