This summer, I was invited to share Letters from Silicon Valley with the BBC. This is the first of my letters and aired on BBC Business Daily on Friday September 26th, 2014. It was bookended by an interview with Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel and the haunting opus, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, read by Dylan Thomas.
The BBC’s Manuela Saragosa hosted the show. Here’s her introduction:
Saragosa: Seeing the world from a Silicon Valley perspective where failing is essential to success…
van Diggelen: You might be thinking that encouraging employees to fail is the nuttiest thing you’ve ever heard. But here’s the thing: if you don’t create a risk taking culture, then how are you going to invent the future?
Saragosa: … that’s Silicon Valley for you. As Peter Thiel says, it’s a counter cultural kind of place and California’s ultra competitive technology industry has its own way of going about things. Take success: to get there, failure is positively encouraged. Journalist, Alison van Diggelen has this report from San Francisco.
van Diggelen: The popular cartoon character, Homer Simpson famously said, “Trying is the first step to failure.”
I imagine Homer wouldn’t survive long in the tech world of Silicon Valley, where trying and failing is vital to the region’s dominance as the global center of innovation.
In Silicon Valley, it’s a badge of honor to fail, as long as you fail fast and learn from the experience. Here in Silicon Valley, mistakes don’t define you. They refine you.
Fear of failure doesn’t hold people back.
That’s why Google is constantly putting out products “in beta.” They try them out, and if they take off, like Gmail, support goes full throttle.
We all know Gmail, but do you remember Google Desktop, Google PowerMeter and Google Health? Probably not. They were launched and then quietly discontinued. Failures, yes, but you can be sure they delivered valuable lessons for Google products. Google Glass may go the same way, but it won’t damn the company as a failure. Not in Silicon Valley, anyway.
You see, failure is viewed differently here. That’s why innovation blooms in SV.
Some of the most innovative leaders in SV have the mantra, “if you’re not failing half the time, you’re not trying hard enough.”
They create a climate of cooperation, allowing teams to make and learn from mistakes, and change “business as usual.”
For skeptics, you might think encouraging employees to fail is the nuttiest thing you’ve ever heard, but here’s the thing: If you don’t create a risk-taking culture that condones, even celebrates failure, then how are you going to invent the future?
Incremental steps just won’t cut it. True innovation needs giant leaps.
If Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had accepted the DOS command-line-interface and didn’t ‘think different,’ we might still be stuck in the dark ages of black computer screens…
But how to overcome your fear of failure?
I recently interviewed Professor John Krumboltz at the Commonwealth Club of California. He’s the author of Fail Fast, Fail Often and is renowned for his fail fast, fail often mantra. He’s spent a lifetime at Silicon Valley’s Stanford University, exploring why successful people spend less time planning and more time acting.
“Making mistakes is important to human development,” he stresses. “Just do it!”
He cites the example of SV’s Pixar Studios, which makes computer-animated films like Wall-e and Finding Nemo. Pixar’s President, Ed Catmull says a few good ideas are often buried amid many “half-baked and outright stinkers.” By giving themselves permission to fail again and again, the team weeds out bad ideas quickly and gets to the place where real work can occur. Catmull describes the process as going from “suck” to “non-suck.”
In the business world, fear of failure can prevent you sticking your neck out, being innovative, trying something new. Perhaps you’re paralyzed by the Homer Simpson’s defeatist: “if I don’t try, then I won’t fail.”
Instead, remember that no one sets out to fail: failure isn’t your friend, but fear of failure is definitely your enemy.
Alison van Diggelen, of Fresh Dialogues, for the BBC World Service in Silicon Valley
“Believe in yourself.” That’s the core advice from Weili Dai, cofounder of Marvell, whom some are dubbing the new Tech Wonder Woman, given the recent ouster of Carol Bartz from Yahoo. Dai’s advice for women in business is resonating, given the focus on women’s crucial role in reviving the economy at the historic APEC Women and the Economy Summit in San Francisco last week, chaired by Hillary Clinton. The summit concluded that that increasing women’s participation in the economy could lead to a 14 percent rise in per capita income by 2020.
Weili Dai spoke at APEC and has strong views about women’s role in the business world. She argues that the best way to grow the world economy is to fully engage women as business leaders. She points out that fewer than 29% of global decision making positions are held by women. Encouraging more women to focus on science and technology is key she says. At the Game Changers Conference in Silicon Valley, despite calls from other delegates for trade intervention against China, she voiced her preference for collaboration not confrontation. “We are powerful, China is powerful. Today, we live in the global world….let’s collaborate…cooperation is the healthy thing to do.”
In this Fresh Dialogues interview, she shares some tips about how to succeed in the tech world. A native of Shanghai, Dai attended UC Berkeley and cofounded Marvell in 1995. Since then, she’s helped to grow the company into one of the world’s largest chipmakers. Marvell touts a few admirable green policies but could do better as a green leader, coming 434th in Newsweek’s green ranking of America’s largest 500 companies.
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Reid Hoffman’s concept of leveraging the power of entrepreneurship was echoed again this summer when I talked with Lesa Mitchell, VP for Advancing Innovation at the Kauffman Foundation. She shared her enthusiasm that, for the first time, the Federal Government is waking up to the enormous impact entrepreneurship can have on the economy and recently created an Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It has limited staff and funding, but it’s a start. I wonder if it will one day include a department of GREEN entrepreneurship? It’s widely accepted that “picking winners” is not the best use of government resources, however, there is much government can do to create a fertile ecosystem for startups to thrive.
Lesa Mitchell recently testified before Congress and shared some of her top recommendations with me:
1. The need to development world-class commercialization boot camps for university students and faculty and entrepreneurs, to get innovation out of labs and into commercial production – this she says is the “low hanging fruit.”
2. Before giving grants, the government must set rules to encourage transparency, sharing data, resources and outcomes. Mitchell cited Kauffman’s iBridge Network (a Craigslist for innovation) as a suitable model to create a “lens into universities.”
3. A free agency licensing model should be adopted to encourage more rapid commercialization of innovation. This idea has created some controversy, but the Kauffman team should be applauded for not pulling its punches.
For more information on the Kauffman Foundation’s work on entrepreneurship and startup trends click here
June 24 marked the 13th annual SDForum Visionary Awards, a celebration of the innovators and chutzpah that make Silicon Valley unique. Although the four visionaries come from diverse backgrounds, Silicon Valley was the common theme for the evening. The visionaries gave a revealing glimpse into the Silicon Valley State of Mind. What exactly is Silicon Valley? What’s its role in the world?
This week, we look at Reid Hoffman’s viewpoint. He’s co-founder of LinkedIn and a renowned innovator in Silicon Valley. He had some strong words to say about the power of entrepreneurship and its ability to jumpstart the economy.
Jeff Weinerof LinkedIn introduced Reid Hoffman as someone with a brilliant strategic mind and ability to invent the future. As well as being Executive Chairman of LinkedIn, Hoffman is also a partner with venture capitalists, Graylock Partners. Pointing to his colleague’s multidisciplinary background (Hoffman studied symbolic systems and philosophy at Stanford and Oxford respectively), Weiner concluded that education provided the building blocks to create an outstanding public thinker and social networking pioneer. Weiner reminded the audience that Hoffman understood the ability of technology to inform and connect people, inspiring him to launch Socialnet (a precursor to LinkedIn) before Facebook and MySpace existed.
Hoffman walked to the podium with some reluctance, saying that listening to the introduction made him “want to run and hide”; yet he started his speech off by grounding us in time and place.
“It’s an enormous privilege to be at this center fulcrum of how we change the world, that we call Silicon Valley,” he said, and posed the powerful question, “What more should we do with that?”
Talking like a true Silicon Valley techie, he suggested not two “answers,” but two “vectors” to his question. And, the visionary he is, Hoffman thinks BIG. First, he recommended leveraging entrepreneurship as a powerful way to get the world economy back on track. Drawing from author, Tom Friedman’s thesis, Hoffman said,
“We live in a world that is increasingly flat and increasingly accelerating. When you have challenges like economic turbulence and uncertainty… entrepreneurship is a really good pattern…we need to make it more available globally.”
Provoking wry laughter from the crowd, he pointed out that there is no entrepreneurs’ lobby in Washington DC, and implied there should be one to encourage entrepreneurship as part of the stimulus package, both here in the U.S. and around the world.
His second “vector” or call to action was: how can we take business models to the non-profit sector? Drawing from his work at Kiva.org and Endeavor.org, he suggested hybrid models of self-sustaining nonprofits that can help spread entrepreneurship and create high impact change.
“I love to play at the heart of what we do best in Silicon Valley,” said Hoffman. “To take risks, develop technologies and use financing and inspire entrepreneurship to create a lever by which we move the world.”
You see, failure is viewed differently here. That’s why innovation blooms in SV.
