Authors: Eric Weiner
Places, like artwork, can be too pretty. Their ornateness distracts
from the serious purpose at hand. Silicon Valley doesn’t have that problem. The region’s main drag, El Camino Real, with its muffler shops, dry cleaners, and fast-food joints, could be anywhere in America. As we’ve seen, genius doesn’t require paradise. Throughout the ages, many a genius has done his best work in shabby settings. Einstein, for one, wrote his general theory of relativity at the kitchen table in his dingy Berne apartment.
Genius doesn’t need extraordinary settings because it sees the extra in the ordinary. The mundane, boring stuff is sometimes the most important. Consider “weak preferred stock.” Admittedly not as sexy as the Apple Watch or Google’s self-driving car, it is nonetheless one of the Valley’s most important innovations, and crucial to its success. It created a whole new stock structure that helped make launching a new company more feasible. Boring but important.
Throughout my time in Silicon Valley, I keep having flashbacks. I keep thinking, “Wait, this isn’t new at all. This is the way they did it in Athens or Florence, or Hangzhou.” I don’t say this aloud. Nobody wants to hear it. They’re too caught up in the illusion that Silicon Valley was created ex nihilo, from nothing. Silicon Valley, in fact, is a Frankenstein place, assembled from bits and pieces of golden ages past and soldered together into something supposedly new.
Everywhere I look I detect echoes of these golden ages past. As in ancient Athens, people here are motivated by something other than personal gain. They are doing it not for themselves, at least not only for themselves, but to further their religion—making the world a better place through the transformative power of technology. A recent survey by the consulting firm Accenture found that people who work in Silicon Valley care more about what their peers think than do people who work elsewhere. They are deeply loyal workers. Their loyalty, though, is not to any particular company but to one another, and to the creed of technology.
Silicon Valley most closely resembles Edinburgh. This is no coincidence; America’s founding fathers were deeply influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment. The geniuses of that day, as you recall, were not just
thinkers but tinkers. They were men of action, guided by the Doctrine of Improvability.
There must be a better way.
I’m excited about my meeting with the Man Who Can See around Corners. That’s how Roger McNamee is known in some quarters of the Valley. A venture capitalist, musician, and friend and business partner of Bono’s, he possesses the sort of elevated vision that is so essential when worshipping Hindu deities or funding start-ups.
I’m waiting in a small conference room on Menlo Park’s famous Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of the Valley, with its row of pleasant but perfectly ordinary offices, when Roger walks in. He looks just as I expected: blue jeans, T-shirt, woven bracelets, long hair. When discussing business practices, he is considerably more likely to quote Jerry Garcia than Michael Porter. Unlike the Man with No Cell Phone, the Man Who Can See around Corners owns several, which he places on the table, like talismans.
So far, so good. But you can imagine my disappointment when he promptly disabuses me of this seeing-around-corners stuff. “That’s all bullshit,” he says, deploying a word that I’ve heard more often than
microchip
since arriving here.
“Okay,” I say. “So if you’re not seeing around corners, or through walls, what is it that you do exactly?”
“I study history. I do real-time anthropology. Then I form hypotheses about what must come next in relative probability.”
This is the way Roger really speaks. Like a tie-dyed Galton. Roger, I soon realize, personifies a certain Silicon Valley type: socially awkward, more comfortable with numbers than with people, but, paradoxically, also possessing rare insights into our social selves that elude more extroverted observers. The Valley, where the heroic nerd rules, is a great place for people like Roger McNamee.
I press him. What exactly do you
do
? How do you decide if an idea is worth backing or not?
“I’m open to the notion that the future is different from the past but not wedded to it.”
I have another flashback. Again, to the Scottish Enlightenment, for
those words could just as easily have come from the mouth of David Hume. Roger had just articulated Hume’s empiricism, a school of philosophy, albeit with a California twist. Hume was open to the possibility that the future would be just like the past, but he wasn’t wedded to it. Just because the sun rose in the sky yesterday, he said, doesn’t mean it will tomorrow. David Hume would have made an excellent venture capitalist.
Roger, like that other Scottish invention Sherlock Holmes, takes a detective’s approach to his job, focusing on motive and opportunity—especially opportunity, for that part of the equation, he says, “is grossly, grossly underweighted. You sit here and hear people say their success is based on their ability. The amount of self-deception here is amazing.”
The way Roger sees it, places of genius such as Silicon Valley are all about creating critical mass—Martin Guttmann’s phase transition—and two ways exist to do that, with space or with time. Timing matters. Extract Leonardo da Vinci from sixteenth-century Florence and plop him down in twenty-first-century Florence and he is no longer a genius but the inmate of a beautiful prison.
“All is flux,” Heraclitus said, and this ancient Greek idea informs every aspect of life in the Valley, where an almost theological belief in fluidity has merged with a technological evangelism—or, as Roger puts it, “this notion that the world must change so it might as well be us in the driver’s seat.”
This sort of nervy optimism is helpful, but only if it’s tempered with a keen understanding of timing. Technokinds arrive in Silicon Valley every day hoping, expecting, to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, forgetting that, as Roger tells me, “the Zuckerberg thing is over, and it might be another ten years before we get the next Zuckerberg. These things don’t happen on demand, because in order for them to work the preconditions of societal acceptance of whatever it is you’re doing has to be there.”
Mozart could not have said it better. He knew that audience matters, and he owed his success, at least in part, to the highly appreciative audience he found in Vienna. The denizens of Silicon Valley (the smart ones at least) also recognize the importance of audience. Their audience, though, is not the royal court or music connoisseurs. It is
the entire planet—anyone with an Internet connection and a few dollars of disposable income.
One of the more persistent myths of Silicon Valley is that it is wholly tradition-free, a place that exists in the near future, with no regard for the past. Consider this quote, though: “You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before.” That statement could easily have been uttered by an ancient Greek, or a Chinese philosopher or perhaps an Enlightenment-era Scot.
Those are, however, the words of Steve Jobs. He was speaking about his relationship with Robert Noyce, father of the microchip. Jobs, not known as lacking in self-confidence, had reached out to Noyce for advice during Apple’s early days. Years later, the Google founders would similarly turn to Jobs for guidance. When Mark Zuckerberg ran into trouble in the early days of Facebook, he turned to Roger McNamee for advice.
Every golden age has a mentor system, whether acknowledged or not. In incubators and start-ups across the Valley, high-tech versions of Verrocchio’s workshop hum along. They are less dusty, with considerably fewer chickens and rabbits underfoot, but the principle is the same: older, wiser veterans relaying their knowledge to eager acolytes. Granted, these acolytes are less patient than Leonardo da Vinci, and few could stomach a decadelong apprenticeship, but they would certainly agree with Leonardo’s maxim “The pupil who does not surpass his master is mediocre.”
These technokinds may not know they are adhering to a tradition, but they are, even if that tradition is one of “disrupting” tradition. Culture is social DNA. It transmits traditions from one generation to the next, largely invisibly to us. We may not know which particular set of genes gave us blue eyes, but they’re still blue. Likewise, we behave in certain ways because of this invisible social DNA.
A good example is open-plan offices. The evidence is now fairly clear that they don’t work, that they squelch, rather than nurture, creativity. Yet walk into any start-up in the Valley and you’ll find an open-plan office. Why? Because that’s the way it’s always been done.
Of course, appealing to tradition is no way to dislodge a big fat check from the well-manicured hands of a venture capitalist. You can’t very well say,
“My groundbreaking app is based on centuries of tradition.” No, you must pretend that it is radically new and disruptive. Everyone in Silicon Valley plays this charade. The smart players, though, realize it is a charade.
Inevitably, our discussion veers to Silicon Valley’s favorite topic: failure. I ask him about the truism that Silicon Valley embraces failure.
Yes, failure is part of the mix, he says, but it is a means, not an end. If you fail repeatedly, and in the same manner, you’re an idiot, not a genius. The guiding principle for “successful failure” is the scientific method. “Scientific method is about failing until something works, right? It’s about failing in a thoughtful and efficient manner. Failure can be a wonderful learning experience as long as it’s in the aid of some continuing process.” The important thing, he says, is to fail early. “You kill the ones that aren’t working right away.”
Here we run headfirst into what has become a Silicon Valley mantra: “Fail fast,” and its offshoot, “Fail fast, fail better.” While failing fast is a good idea—all geniuses through the ages have had this ability to cut their losses and move on—I think these slogans miss the mark. Fail better? What does that mean? You can’t fail better; you can only fail different.
Charles Darwin, whose theories inform so much of Silicon Valley (we’re all evolving!), would no doubt advise us to fail foolishly. His “fools’ experiments” were designed to poke fate, on the off chance that today is not like yesterday and tomorrow is not like today. Darwin, like Silicon Valley, embraced possibility, not failure.
This approach to failure dovetails nicely with the Power of Constraints. The best ideas, Roger argues, are the ones that enter the world imperfect, broken. They require work, and through refinement, by failing foolishly over and over, eventually something better, something good, emerges. Silicon Valley’s success is built on the carcasses of its failures. In the Valley, failure is fertilizer. Like all fertilizer, though, it must be used wisely by a skilled farmer, otherwise it is useless and smells bad.
As I said, little was actually invented in Silicon Valley. The transistor was invented in New Jersey, the cell phone in Illinois, the World Wide Web in Switzerland, venture capital in New York. Valleyites, like the ancient
Athenians, are tremendous moochers. What Plato said of the Greeks holds true for Silicon Valley. What they borrow (or steal) from foreigners they perfect. No, Silicon Valley is not the place where good ideas are born. It is the place where they learn to walk.
It is also a place where many ideas come to die. Every day, they are knocked off, mercilessly and systematically. This is the real genius of the Valley. Every golden age needs discerners, people gifted in the ability to distinguish good ideas from bad ones, beautiful music from workmanlike, scientific breakthroughs from incremental advances, a sublime poem from a word salad. In Athens, that role was played by the polis, the citizens. In musical Vienna, it was the royal court and discerning listeners. In Florence, it was the patrons, especially the Medicis. Who are the Medicis of Silicon Valley?
There is no one answer to that question, but the venture capitalists, as well as so-called angel investors, probably come closest. It is not a perfect analogy—Roger scoffs at the notion—but in a world where cash determines which ideas are nourished and which are left to die on the vine, he who controls the cash controls much.
I like Roger. I like the way he talks like a scientist with a poetry problem. I like the way he looks at Silicon Valley with open eyes, and not rose-colored Google Glass. Is he a genius? I’m not sure, but he certainly has genius tendencies—the ability, for instance, to focus laserlike on a problem for longer than most of us would consider normal. Yet he also practices “defocused attention” and has many outside interests. He reads forty novels a year and plays in a band called Moon Alice. “The novels help me understand others. The music helps me understand myself,” he tells me before we say good-bye. I turn to leave, but stop to ask him one last question.
“Are you smart or lucky?”
Roger doesn’t hesitate. “What fucking difference does it make?”
As I walk back to my car, I realize that his answer, delivered in colorful American vernacular, is actually a very Greek thing to say. Who are we, mere mortals, to say where the world of human agency ends and that of the gods begins?
Eugene, my late friend from Florence, would have liked Silicon Valley. Like a good piña colada, it gets the proportions right. It balances ruthless competition with a generous, and wise, collaboration. (One study found that people who have competed with each other are later able to collaborate better than those who had not once squared off.) It is simultaneously large and small—big enough to have a global impact yet small enough that people still use first names. It combines intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
I’m doing this because I love it, and, oh, I’m also making boatloads of money.
It is a highly social place, but one where introverts rule. It is a place that is disrupting the world, but also a place that cares deeply what others think, what
you
think. It is a place where extraordinary leaps are made on a very ordinary stage. Whatever you can rightly say about Silicon Valley, the opposite is also true.
Myths are not necessarily bad. They serve a purpose. Myths inspire. A completely myth-free society would not be creative. Consider one of the most intractable of Silicon Valley myths: Moore’s law. First observed by Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel, it states that the processing power of microchips doubles every two years.