Authors: Eric Weiner
First starters such as Silicon Valley become magnets, and once magnetized, an irresistible momentum takes hold. Again, creativity is contagious. Several studies have found that we are more creative when surrounded by creative coworkers, even if we don’t interact directly with these colleagues. And recall that we get a creativity boost from merely watching “schema violations” (someone eating pancakes for dinner, for instance). Something about being in the presence of creativity inspires us to think more creatively ourselves.
I experience a bit of this contagion myself. After only a few days in the Valley, I begin to view the world differently. I begin to see possibilities that I didn’t see back East. I find words such as
beta version
and
hackathon
rolling off my tongue fluently. I’m not the most entrepreneurial of souls, but here, basking in the California sunshine and fizzy optimism, I can see myself changing the world—and also becoming filthy rich in the process.
On my way to meet Chuck, I had spotted a moving van, parked outside a nondescript office building in Mountain View. The movers were busily carting off ergonomic chairs and Danish desks, no doubt discarding the carcass of some failed venture and making room for the next. Silicon Valley’s most iconic symbol is not the iPhone or the microchip but the moving van.
This fluidity, says Chuck, is the key to understanding the Valley. Nothing stands still in Silicon Valley; the place has a kinetic energy—not unlike what I witnessed in Calcutta, but more directed. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra,
“Move fast and break things,” has become part of the local mythology, even if he recently backed away from the “break things” part of that motto.
Look at the top ten firms in Silicon Valley, says Chuck. Every five or ten years, the list completely changes, with perhaps one or two exceptions. “There is incredible, incredible turnover,” he says. This is not a new concept. I’m reminded of Florence and how the committee overseeing the famous Duomo, the Opera del Duomo, rotated its leadership every few months.
One of the biggest myths about Silicon Valley, says Chuck, is that people here take risks. It is a myth that is simultaneously true and untrue, a Janusian construction that would tickle a Scot. Chuck says Silicon Valley celebrates risk, yet at the same time “it has some of the best mechanisms for avoiding the consequences of risk in the world.”
“Such as?”
“Just think about it. These entrepreneurs, we’re told, deserve their money because of the risk they take. But you don’t see people jumping off the tops of buildings here. They tend to land on their feet. They tend to land in places like this, drinking cappuccinos, because the risk is a peculiar kind of risk. Most of the people in high tech will admit if they lost their job, they would find another one. They might even find a better one.”
“So they’re working with a net?”
“Yes. A huge net. It’s easier to take risk when you are insulated from it.”
How different that is, I think, from the risk takers of Florence, where, as Sheila, the art historian, told me, if you failed, “you destroyed yourself, you destroyed your family for generations.”
I’m contemplating that sort of momentous risk, sipping my good coffee, gaping at the Google driverless cars that glide by, when the Man with No Cell Phone demolishes another Silicon Valley myth. Specifically, the myth that it is a hothouse of good ideas. It is not. I confess this surprises me. I always thought Silicon Valley’s forte was the good idea.
“Bullshit,” says Chuck, setting me straight. What makes Silicon Valley special is not the idea itself but what happens once the idea washes
up here. The region Siliconizes ideas just as India Indianizes them. What comes out of the blender is recognizable but fundamentally different.
In Silicon Valley ideas aren’t invented but are processed in faster and smarter ways than they are elsewhere. “If you have an idea, people will tell you where that idea fits in with the ecology of ideas that is operative,” explains Chuck. “There are mechanisms in place, institutions set up, to bring together bright people.” If Silicon Valley were a brain, it wouldn’t be the frontal lobe or even a brain cell; it would be a synapse, a connector.
Silicon Valley is not about technology. Sure, the products are technological, but those are the ends, not the means. “People say they come here because it’s a technology hub, but that is merely a way to legitimize the move,” Chuck says. “The real reason people come here is that deal making happens here in different ways and it’s possible to realize deals in different ways.”
The Valley is good at absorbing new arrivals, and just as adept at spitting them out. “You can talk to people who have been here only a few weeks and they talk to you as if they’ve always been a part of Silicon Valley. It’s an absolutely amazing place for taking people in and for releasing people, letting them go.” Again, places of genius are colanders as well as magnets.
Another myth about Silicon Valley is that it is shallow. This one, says Chuck, happens to be true. Your average Valleyite knows a lot of people but not well, not deeply. This is precisely what makes the region so successful—not people’s attachment to the place but their lack of attachment. “People can insert themselves into networks quickly and extract themselves equally easily, and that’s what’s magical about the place. It’s not that people are saying, ‘Silicon Valley do or die, I’ll kill for Silicon Valley.’ Quite the opposite.”
In 1973, a young sociologist named Mark Granovetter wrote an academic paper that, over the years, has become the most cited paper in all of sociology (29,672 citations at last count). It’s called “The Strength of Weak Ties.” A short paper, a “fragment of a theory,” he called it at the time, it is nonetheless fascinating for both its simplicity and its intriguing, counterintuitive thesis.
The title says it all. What we think of as weak ties—acquaintances, coworkers, etc.—are actually incredibly powerful. Likewise, what we think of as strong ties—close friends, family—are actually weak. In his paper, Granovetter concedes this doesn’t appear to make sense but adds, teasingly, “Paradoxes are a welcome antidote to theories which explain everything all too neatly.”
I’m captivated by this theory and suspect it goes a long way toward explaining the success of Silicon Valley. I’m determined to track down Granovetter, wherever he is, so you can imagine my delight when I discover that he is right here, in Palo Alto, a city where, like Calcutta, the possibility of coincidence is apparently greater than it is elsewhere.
The next morning, I find Granovetter at his Stanford office—one that would make Beethoven or Einstein proud. Stacks of paper rise from his desk like monuments built by some now-extinct civilization. Threatening to topple at any moment, they tower over the office’s occupant, a compact man, quiet but not unfriendly.
I take a seat, craning my neck to see Granovetter behind the pylons of paper, and ask him about his fragment of a theory. How can weak ties be strong?
“You are more likely to learn something new from a weak tie,” he tells me. This holds true for a number of reasons. A weak tie is more likely to come from a different background than you, thus the benefits of an immigrant society such as Vienna or Silicon Valley. (Today, 50 percent of all start-ups in Silicon Valley have at least one cofounder who was born outside the United States.) Also, we are more willing to offend someone with whom we have weak ties, and a willingness to offend is an important part of creativity.
Strong ties make us feel good, make us feel that we belong, but they also constrict our worldview. A group with strong ties is more likely to lapse into groupthink than one with weak ties.
Weak ties aren’t always good, Granovetter explains. “If you are in a stable place where not much is happening and the main thing you need is support, then weak ties are not going to help you much.” But in a place such as Silicon Valley weak ties are gold.
Think of weak ties as dots. As we’ve seen, the more dots at our disposal, the better. Each weak tie is a dot, and in fluid places all of these dots form a pipeline through which knowledge is transmitted and ideas processed.
The beauty of Granovetter’s weak-ties theory is that it not only describes the process of Silicon Valley but also many of its products. What is Facebook, after all, but a supermarket of weak ties? Mark Zuckerberg didn’t invent weak ties, but he did make them “a lot less expensive,” says Granovetter.
Over the years, Granovetter’s fragment of a theory has been put to the test by other social scientists, and it holds up. Jill Perry-Smith, a business professor at Emory University, studied an applied-research institute and found that those scientists with more weak ties, rather than a few close colleagues, were more creative. Other studies found similar results, leading one psychologist, Keith Sawyer, to conclude, a bit tongue-in-cheek perhaps, that “strong friendships aren’t good for creativity.”
I ask Granovetter about this, and he says that, while that may be true, both weak and strong ties have their advantages. And he wants to make one thing clear: he isn’t advocating that we sever all strong ties. “I mean, my wife wouldn’t like that.”
I am sitting in a nondescript Starbucks (is there any other kind?) in a nondescript strip mall in Sunnyvale. It could be any strip mall in any suburb, but it isn’t. Not if you know the history. If you were here in the early 1970s, you might notice two teenagers, long-haired slackers in jeans and military jackets, riding clunky ten-speeds en route to Owen Russell’s Hobby Shop. There, they loaded up on wires, cables, motherboards, and alligator clips before cycling home. The slackers were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and they were buying parts to build the Apple One, one of the first personal computers.
“So the modern world starts here, in this thoroughly uninteresting strip mall,” declares Michael Malone, with the sort of certainty I’ve come to expect in the Valley. Malone was a witness to this secret history. He grew up three blocks from Jobs and often saw the two Steves returning
from the hobby shop and wondered what they were up to. He had assumed that the alligator clips were “roach clips,” for smoking marijuana. In fact, the two Steves, who did smoke plenty of marijuana, were following a path of bold tinkering laid down by the likes of Lee de Forest and Fred Terman decades earlier.
Malone is a history nut in a place that, by all appearances, doesn’t give a tweet about history. He’s lived in the Valley since he was twelve years old, worked for Hewlett-Packard for a while, wrote a much-read column for the
San Jose Mercury News
, penned several biographies of key players in the region, and now enjoys the unofficial title of “professor emeritus of Silicon Valley.”
I sense something different about Malone, then realize what it is. He’s the only person I’ve seen here wearing a sports coat. A practical choice, he says, a bit defensively, a holdover from his newspaper days when he carried a reporter’s notebook in the side pocket. In Silicon Valley, as in Scotland, even your fashion choices are justified on practical grounds.
Malone has an opinion, usually delivered in sailor’s tongue, about everything, from his days picking cherries in the fields of Santa Clara County (“What a shitty job.”) to the beautiful weather (“Weather is important. Everyone on the East Coast says it’s not, but that’s bullshit. It’s completely important.”) to the good life in the Valley (“Come on, why
wouldn’t
you want to be here?”).
When I push him about the real secret to Silicon Valley’s success, he concedes, “There’s a certain amount of luck in all this.”
Let’s examine the “lucky breaks” that came Silicon Valley’s way, the various moving parts that had to click into place for this pleasant but otherwise unremarkable valley of orchards and dried prunes to transform itself into an economic juggernaut, and the closest thing we have to a modern Athens or Florence. The list is long. Beautiful weather. A tradition of tinkering, first with radios then with transistors and microchips. A brilliant and persistent professor and a university that backed his unorthodox approach. The Cold War and the buckets of government money it unleashed. The counterculture movement of the 1960s. All told, it was an incredible confluence of good fortune.
Not so fast,
I can hear Dean Simonton say. It’s one thing to be lucky and quite another to “exploit chance.” Any one of Silicon Valley’s “lucky breaks” might have been overlooked elsewhere.
“Come on,” says Malone suddenly. “Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
We hop into his pickup truck, which, given his sports jacket and professorial bearing, briefly causes a schema violation in my brain, but I recover nicely. We drive a few minutes, then stop at an intersection, the sort of California intersection where pedestrians dare not tread. But tread we do, hopping out of the pickup and standing there, with the cars whizzing by, their drivers eyeing us as if we were from Mars, or possibly the East Coast.
“Um, why are we standing in the middle of this intersection?”
“Let’s say it’s 1967.”
“Okay, I’m with you, 1967. Can we go now?”
“And it’s about five or six o’clock, on a weekday afternoon.”
“Yes?”
“If you had been standing here, you would have seen a kid coming this way on his bicycle, heading home from Stevens Creek swim practice, and he would come up here and cut across to his home over here, and you’d see another kid, also on a bike, and you’d see a Mercedes blasting down Freemont Avenue, heading toward the Los Altos Country Club. The kid on the bike? Steve Wozniak, inventor of the personal computer. The other kid on the bike? Ted Hoff, the inventor of the microprocessor. The Mercedes guy? Robert Noyce, coinventor of the integrated circuit, founder of Fairchild and Intel. So you had the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, and the personal computer. How much money is that worth in the modern world? Ten trillion dollars. It defines the modern world.”
“But it’s only an intersection?”
“Exactly. What could be more Silicon Valley than an intersection next to a freeway in suburbia, and with geniuses crossing paths?”