I was browsing through my online reading list this morning (as I do every morning), and I stumbled upon this Dezeen article talking about a big new 6.5 million square foot development being proposed in Miami’s Park West neighborhood.
The goal of the project is to transform Miami into “Florida’s Silicon Valley.”
This sort of thing is happening all around the world. From Buffalo to Lisbon, cities everywhere are betting on tech, startups, and entrepreneurship to grow their economy in the 21st century. And I personally think that’s really exciting.
But as I was reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of an old essay that Paul Graham wrote back in 2006 called, How to be Silicon Valley. (Paul Graham is a famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor).
In his essay Graham argues that to be or to replicate the model of Silicon Valley in your city, you basically need two types of people: rich people and nerds. The idea, of course, being that the nerds work on the cool new ideas and the rich people then fund them.
Using this logic, he specifically calls out Miami as a city where few startups happen and as a city not likely to become another Silicon Valley. Though there’s lots of money and rich people in Miami, there simply aren’t enough nerds. In Graham’s words: “It’s not the kind of place nerds like.”
But that was back in 2006.
The iPhone didn’t even exist yet. Things have since changed. Now there are successful tech companies like Snapchat (valuation north of $15 billion) that are based out of cities like Los Angeles. And I think you could argue that Los Angeles and Miami do share some similarities.
So while it may have seemed far fetched in 2006 for Miami to become a startup hub, is that really the case today?
Image: Dezeen
Startup guru Paul Graham writes really interesting essays. Judging by the date stamps on his website, he’s been easily doing it for more than a decade. And he’s gotten really good at it – everyone in the startup community reads them. Whenever he posts one, I know I read it. No question.
His most recent essay is called: Mean People Fail. And in it, he argues that the structural changes that have happened in our economy have also meant a reversal in the correlation between “meanness” and success. I know that might sound a bit funny, but hear him out:
For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.
That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.
That has always been the case for thinkers, which is why this trend began with them. When you think of successful people from history who weren’t ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, and this is reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success.
This makes sense to me. But the other reason I find this interesting is because I’ve wondered before if I should be more of an asshole in my professional life. Some people are really good at being assholes. I’m not. It’s not in my nature. When I manage and work with people, I’d rather try and create intrinsic motivation as opposed to using some form of brute force. In my view, the latter burns social capital.
So if you happen to be of the same mindset, you might like to hear that you’re probably sitting on the right trend line. Don’t be mean.
In the spirit of Startup Weekend, I thought it would be interesting to go back in time and pretend to pitch one of the most disruptive innovations of the 19th century: the automobile.
Typically pitches start by first outlining the problem. The idea is to make your audience aware of the pain point, so that they feel excited when you ultimately pitch your solution.
In the case of cars, the incumbent technology would have been horses. So I can imagine somebody standing up and talking about how horses are slow and how they drop stinky poo all over our city streets. And that the time has come for a revolution in personal mobility! Enough of this crap! :)
But while many of us probably can’t imagine a world without cars, try and put yourself in the shoes of somebody at the end of the 19th century who can’t imagine a world without horses. And then think about all the things we have subsequently done to make cars thrive:
We paved roads and created networks of freeways.
We invented rules of the road to ensure that people were operating these new devices properly.
We created a licensing system to ensure that anybody who was operating a car was doing so relatively safely and following the rules that had been created.
We created schools that taught people how to be better drivers.
We started insuring cars for when accidents inevitably happened.
We started having to accept fatal car accident and pedestrian deaths.
We built networks of gas stations. As of 2004, there were 168,000 retail locations selling gas in the United States.
We had to give over large land masses to parking. In fact, we reorganized entire cities so that the car could be better accommodated.
And we setup government transportation divisions to make sure the needs of the car were always being met.
This is a long list of things we had to do to make cars possible and I’m sure there are many others that I have missed. Today, we all know how disruptive cars have been and we’re certainly questioning many of the things we have done. But we also accept this list as being largely normative.
However, before they were the norm, they were insurmountable challenges. How will we teach everyone how to drive these new cars? How will we minimize accidents? How will we make it easy for people to refuel their cars? Where will people store them when they’re not using them?
There were a lot of moving parts to figure out.
Which is why people like Paul Graham have argued that the best ideas almost have to live in your unconscious mind. Because your conscious mind would simply reject them as viable options as soon as you started thinking about all the required moving parts. I guess that’s why they say there’s a very fine line between crazy and brilliant.
Image: Benz Velo