traitorous eight in forming Fairchild.
An innate characteristic of human beings is the reluctance to enter into a deal with anyone with whom there are social, cultural, ethnical or language barriers. In Silicon Valley, such barriers are overcome by a prevailing sense of trust within and between communities that allow exchanges of ideas and pave the way towards a number of collaborations that may not occur in other places in the world.
Experts argue there are three aspects that are important for innovation ecosystems like Silicon Valley – assets, network and culture. Whilst assets get excessive attention, culture doesn’t, and openness to people and collaboration are crucial for innovative activity to occur.
In a trusting environment, fairness also needs to be present. In Silicon Valley, individuals often give up short-term gain to enhance long-term prosperity – an example is Intel’s founders offering
as much as 50% of their firm’s equity (in Intel) to venture capitalists.
If any individual, be it businessmen, scientists or venture capitalists, seeks more than another party deems fair, his or her reputation potentially becomes tarnished, and there is also a likelihood that the level of trust between them reduces. A trusting environment in which people are inclined towards collaboration and fairness is an important feature of a successful innovation ecosystem like Silicon Valley, and trust is essential for providing the correct conditions for innovation.
In existing innovation ecosystems there are unwritten societal incentives and motivations in place that encourage cooperation and trust among people, and prevent people playing ‘zero- sum games’ i.e. seeking personal advantage over the long term success of a business. These pave the way towards a collaborative culture that sustains the life of such ecosystems.
In my experience, the ability of people in Silicon Valley to share, trust and collaborate combined with the closeness of people with ideas, companies, universities and finance makes it very attractive and inspires entrepreneurs with a single-minded pursuit to
succeed. As legendary
venture capitalist John Doerr famously observed, “Silicon Valley is not a place, but a state of mind.”
The culture of the Valley is based on a recipe that allows humans to mix the basic ingredients of innovation - ideas, talent and capital - in continually productive ways. The Silicon Valley code is often given as follows:
1. Break rules and dream, 2. Open doors and listen, 3. Trust and be trusted, 4. Experiment and innovate together, 5. Seek fairness, not advantage, 6. Err, fail, and persist, 7. Pay it forward.
That’s the culture of Silicon Valley that makes it so successful.
15 entrepreneurcountry
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