Silicon Valley and Everywhere else

It has been an interesting month with a lot of exciting work with a lot of smart people taking up my time. I've had my head down and been doing some serious graft and hadn't really noticed the minor details like the fact that I'd bounced between three continents, changed my time zone 8 times and taken eating out with all meals accompanied by technical debate and napkin sketching to be the normal way to consume sustenance.

Then last week I had a reality check when I suddenly realized I was in fact doing for a living something I dreamed of as a kid.
So, what prompted this moment of clarity?

Well, I looked up and found myself hurtling down the 101 between Burlingame and Palo Alto in Silicon Valley in the back of a rented mini-van, MacBook balanced on my knee, hacking some last bits of code together for a product demo I was about to deliver at Stanford University!
Now I may have been doing the relatively easy job from the technical point of view of getting the Rails code of superstar hacker Dave and front end of ex-Hollywood SFX guy George to talk to each other - but that is beside the point! To a young computer obsessed kid growing up in 70s/80s small town Derbyshire, UK, these were almost mythical places and the thought of 'doing computers' for a living tantamount to joining Kirk's crew.

The irony of my working with distance shrinking communications technology and still feeling the gravitational pull of a specific geographical location (and I'm not talking about 'The Mystery Spot') is not lost on me. This is I guess partly to do with my own childhood fascination and partly to do with the fact that despite great work going on elsewhere in the world (and there is lots of it), nowhere else has quite the confluence of smart people, facilities and investment money in such scale.

Over the years of course there have been many examples of attempts to replicate Silicon valley elsewhere, and numerous ongoing debates about why this hasn't or couldn't or shouldn't work and I'm not going to get into that now. Suffice to say that as a tech entrepreneur and innovation consultant the cultural differences between the 'go for it' attitude that prevails in the Valley (and to be fair the US in general) and the risk averse over-caution I meet most often in Europe (there are always exceptions) are extremely vivid.

In Carbon, one of our passions is helping to cultivate a culture of encouragement for innovative thinking and doing, an attitude where a single failure is not perceived as a millstone that must be worn around the neck for public display for the rest of a career and an environment where start-ups, large enterprises, investment and education can all come together with an air of optimism, enthusiasm and excitement and really start to achieve something.
It is heartening that on this quest we are discovering more and more like minded people.

Who knows where these combined efforts could lead, but it would be nice to think that one day, some fresh faced kid from Mountain View CA, might grow up to blog about his adventures hurtling down the M62 in a rented hovercar, while hacking a 3D Holographic interface to a quantum computer driven back-end on their way to demo their product at The University of Huddersfield.