George Osborne hopes Britain will emerge with its own Silicon Valley
Who better to ask than Silicon Valley’s ace professional blogger, and former FT journalist, Tom Foremski, a leading authority on this subject. Here is his fascinating reply and I’m afraid it seems we will never be in the same league. In essence, you have to have a high tolerance of failure which the British culture does not embrace. Here is Tom’s reply in full:
“Mr Osborne asks why are there no British Internet companies on the scale of a Yahoo or Google? He talks about a recent visit to Silicon Valley and the vibrant, supportive infrastructure here. And he says Britain must do something similar otherwise it will fall ever further behind. He identifies it as a key economic/ competitive issue.
SVW’s take:
“The reason there are no British Googles or Yahoos or EBays is the same reason there are no British Apple Computers, Intels or Seagates. Silicon Valley is not something that can be copied, Israel’s Silicon Wadi is the closest copy, and then everything else around the world could be described as being variations on: a business park built next to a university.
“What’s different is that here is different.
“It’s different because this is a place that tolerates massive amounts of failure. One in 20 startups make it beyond five years, venture capitalists want that ten-bagger, that massive return on investment. But they are prepared to fund ten or twenty startups that fail.
“In Britain, Mr Osborne does not have that culture of tolerance of failure. And the rest of Europe is pretty much the same. If you fail once you are a failure evermore.
“Here, in Silicon Valley, they let you back into the game, time and time again. I know plenty of people who “made it” but they failed six or seven times before that. This is the only place in the world that has such high tolerance of failure.”
Can we view failure as the next step to success? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. In my view, the only failure is never to try out anything new, mistakes are all part of the learning curve.
Tom also anwers my question about the importance of professional bloggers having sponsors as opposed to advertisers and believes we need to develop, indeed he urges George Osborne to endorse a content-reward technology that would financially reward truthful new media. I’m not sure who would monitor this as the truth is subjective, I must ask Tom. He is very firm about these views and says:
“We need that a content-reward technology to make a success of this emerging Internet 2.0 world. By content-reward technology I mean that organizations producing compelling, truthfull content will be rewarded by lots of money. To enable them to continue to provide great content. Unless we can figure out what is one of the most challenging computer/online problems of our time–we will be toast. And….tens of thousands of startups will fail. We wil not have an Internet 2.0.
“Maybe Britain could help? I hope Mr Osborne is reading this post and he can galvanize Britain’s elite researchers and its smartest bus/dev teams and create a content-reward technology for content producers that pays back more than the pennies Google’s AdSense ad network, (and the other online ad networks…) pay. And the money will be invested back into yet more great content… producing a virtuous cycle.
“Something like that would be bigger than Google and Yahoo and WalMart combined, IMHO.”
What do you think?
Hi Ellee, there seems to be a lot of discussion about Silicon Valley at the moment, and my blog is no exception.
I’ve just posted my thoughts on this post of yours, and these three other posts cover more of my thinking on the matter and include a number of links to the discussion on other blogs.