Edu: Creating Your Own Silicon Valley - Ecosystem Building Secrets Revealed

Chris: I saw, somebody involved in the Queensland government, shared a map of Queensland, my, home state where the government had identified tech hubs to invest in.

it was a very Australian, very egalitarian, very shared opportunity style approach to, government investment in startup ecosystem building. and it was completely wrong.

It's the completely wrong approach.

 Hey. I'm Chris.

Yaniv: And I'm Yaniv. And in today's episode we're going to talk about how to build your own Silicon Valley. Actually, Chris, I think this is a bit of a, flawed premise, but. What we see is government ministers and other well-meaning people saying, we're going to build our own little Silicon Valley in our country, in our city, in our state.

we've got a bunch of well-meaning initiatives and, public talking points The truth is it doesn't work. Now, when I say the premise is flawed, I don't think your aim here is to build your own Silicon Valley. There is only one Silicon Valley. and you don't wanna just blindly copy it because you're not going to succeed.

But I think what we wanna talk about today, Chris, is what are the things that operators, governments, founders, investors and all the other stakeholders in an ecosystem can do and should be doing in order to get the best of Silicon Valley and to be able to build what we call in this podcast, Silicon Valley style Startups that can cause disruption at scale.

Chris: Yeah, that's right. And Yaniv, we've got a long list here in our notes of things we want to go through. And, you know, I don't even think this list is, exhaustive actually, but we're trying to hit some of the, essential points that help, as you said, founders, investors, government ministers, and program operators to think about this perhaps in a slightly different way than the way they've been thinking about it so far.

And for each of these, bullets, these subjects, these, characteristics that one should think about. We'll talk about what doesn't work and what does work. and I think what people will find is some of these ones that we're calling out are a little counterintuitive or even directly in opposition of what we've seen, at least some of our local, programs and local government, ministers pushing for as well.

Yaniv: So maybe a bit of spice here, but also hopefully some really valuable advice and a framework for how to think about how can you support an ecosystem without stifling it, which I think is often what happens. So let's start with how do you create a genuine marketplace of ideas, or even Chris, just a genuine marketplace.

Let’s start with what doesn't work.

Chris: early when I came back from Silicon Valley, I, went to some of these programs, these events, these meetups where I heard a common refrain, which was like, we are not coordinated enough and we need to all get together in a room and, talk more. And we need to have better programs and we need to have more government investment.

there's too much going on or none of these things are working. And, it struck me that, there is no government coordination or planning in Silicon Valley. There is no committee where everybody got together and decided thou shelt organize Sandhill Road in this way. there is no, official government body picking winners and losers.

it's a marketplace. A marketplace of ideas. It's an ecosystem emerges organically. And so, despite some of the things we're gonna talk about further down here, where there are specific things that governments or ecosystem players can do and do unilaterally versus massive coordination.

the general idea here is that you want a thousand flowers to bloom and you don't wanna spend forever in committee meetings and planning meetings and coordination and, wait for some master plan to play out. I don't think it works that way.

Yaniv: What we're actually talking about here, Chris, is capitalism and. You know, really startups and the startup ecosystem is fairly unbridled form of capitalism, right? There's a reason why venture capitalists are called venture capitalists. This is really about risk equity and having that sort of organized chaos in the market signals that are the strength of capitalism.

And I think what happens is, even in, capitalist western countries, quite often when you have governments who are looking to see how can we grow our startup ecosystem, they start to turn a little bit in the direction of a planned economy, by the way, I'm not a libertarian.

I think governments have a massively important role to play in creating the right environment for the right type of capitalism to thrive in the interests of the citizens of that country, right? So capitalism is rarely unbridled. Capitalism is something that has a lot of influence and regulation and nudging from government.

But what doesn't work is top down planning and saying, these are the industries that are going to work. These are the startups that are going to win. This is the way in which all the different players in the industry should be interacting with each other. No, you are fertilizing ground, you are tilling the soil.

You are not telling the plants how to grow. Right? And that's really, when we talk about a thousand flowers blooming. You want to create a vigorous capitalist marketplace of ideas and marketplace of capital. otherwise you will end up with inefficiency and with stunted growth.

Chris: Yeah. You know, as a kind of product and platform thinker, I, really think of this as like building a platform, I think government and some of the key stakeholders are responsible for the core primitives and the core, let's call it programs and initiatives that create space for capitalism to thrive.

But Once those platform primitives are figured out and the programs are in motion, they needed to then get out of the way and allow a thousand flowers to bloom and allow the ecosystem to thrive. And so we've put this at the very top because it's, very important.

It's how can you build or, enable these core platform primitives to allow these startups and investors and, operators to thrive in your particular ecosystem, in your particular part of the world.

Yaniv: There are a lot of things a government can do and a community can do and various institutions can do to foster a thriving marketplace, a thriving platform, a thriving.

Capitalist market, right? And what we're talking about here is some of those ways in which they can do that, that are not about top down planning. the reason we put this first is because it's a theme that cuts through every other topic that we discuss.

and so without further ado, I guess let's jump into the next one, which is about focusing on a specific geographical area. So Christie, I know you put this in there. So, talk to us a little bit about this.

Chris: Yeah, so just before we started recording, and perhaps part of what inspired this episode was I saw, somebody involved in the Queensland government, uh, startup ecosystem building efforts, and, he shared a map of Queensland, my, home state where the government had identified tech hubs to invest in.

And it was. Really dotted up the east coast of Queensland, so, Brisbane and, up along the side, and then a couple of spots inland. And it was a very Australian, very egalitarian, very shared opportunity style approach to, government investment in startup ecosystem building. and it was completely wrong.

It's the completely wrong approach. Australia broadly in Queensland specifically, is very sparsely populated. there is just nobody for miles, right? And you know, I'm traveling through Europe right now, and an hour through Europe can end you up in a completely different country.

An hour in Australia ends you up at, you know, the beach from the city. It's like completely crazy. and so to spend the precious little dollars and effort that the Queensland government has and the Australian government more broadly across the entire geography of the state just means that you're, diffuse your effort and we'll achieve critical mass.

Nowhere And again, as a product thinker, I think of this like product management, right? You have to pick a problem an embarrassingly narrow market in this case, you know, a geography, and then put all your wood behind that arrow. Put all your investment in that one place to achieve critical mass.

And so this is, decidedly what is not happening in more egalitarian cultures and societies. Australia being one example.

Yaniv: Actually think it's, less about egalitarian cultures and societies and more about another topic that we talk about a lot, Chris, which is trying to have multiple priorities at the same time and trying to have multiple objectives. I think it's well understood in economics and certainly in startups, even post covid and even in this so-called remote work world, that geographic concentration is a critical ingredient to real flourishing of industry, of innovation, of technology.

ever since the industrial revolution or before, right? Innovation has come from cities, and so if you want to. Back a kind of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is named after a place, right? So if you want to create your own Silicon Valley, it has to be a place, right? You, get that density and the place should probably be one of your biggest cities in general.

That is the smart thing to do. What I think governments attempted to do, and, think what you are seeing here, Chris, is oh, can we use this as an opportunity to spread economic growth and opportunity across all of our citizens they live? And that is a wonderful and lovely idea. unfortunately it doesn't work, for all the reasons that we just discussed.

And so if you wanna invest, invest in one place, and nearly certainly that place should be your biggest city.

Chris: It's a lovely idea. That's dead on arrival. Let's be clear. So the next idea we have here is focus on a specific vertical. So we just talked about focusing on a specific geography. now we're talking about on a specific vertical. Yana, have you added this one actually, sir, do you wanna take it away?

Yaniv: Yeah, absolutely. So I think, again, what we see in Australia, but I believe this is applicable in many countries in the world, is that when the government focuses on these things, they say, we are going to be the Silicon Valley of biotech or the Silicon Valley of Renewable Energy, or the Silicon Valley of robotics,

And you know, I think the gap between what doesn't work and what does work is a bit more subtle. And some of the others, And so I think what does work is to make it easy to capitalize on natural advantages, to take tailwinds, And the tailwind can be, cheap cost of manufacturing if you happen to be in a country that has a cheap cost of manufacturing, or universities or areas of particular expertise, if you look at the history of Silicon Valley and, innovation in the us, so much of it came through academia and through government, through agencies such as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that funded a lot of research, right? And so it's like, okay, if we need to invest a lot in our military, what can we get from that?

You're capitalizing on your natural advantages.

Chris: I think the key with picking a vertical for your country or for the hub that you're trying to build is about these natural advantages that Silicon Valley actually has a kind of natural advantage, which is that it's very good at consumer, it's very good at platforms, and it's very good at SaaS.

New York is very good at fashion and FinTech. LA is very good at content and media tech. and they actually specialize in a way. If you are in a place that is rich in, let's say tourism, I think there's an opportunity to focus on tourism. If you're in a place that's resource rich, stuff you dig outta the ground, maybe there's an opportunity around that.

And so I do think similar to the idea of picking your geography intentionally, picking your verticals intentionally can help, put all your wood behind one arrow and supercharge that, ecosystem and, accelerate your time to critical mass. it's kind of like a nuclear reaction, right?

The next key tactic we've got listed here in terms of building your own Silicon Valley style tech hub is to elevate your expats. You know what doesn't work here is spending a lot of time putting academics, politicians, career coaches, on stage as exemplars of startup operations.

And just to talk endlessly about government programs or academic theories or what have you, what does work is chances are in your community right now, there are people who have had real meaningful success from inside your country. And or have left your country and gone to Silicon Valley, New York, Austin, LA and worked at very successful companies or been part of building very successful companies.

And chances are thanks to Covid, thanks to the natural migration of people, they've come back, they've come back to their hometown because of their families and their roots And, those people need to be embraced and elevated and integrated into your tech hubs. It's really essential.

There's, in Australia, like a lot of meetups and talks and what have you, where there's a lot of people on stage who've never left the country or never built anything or, are not builders at all. they're politicians. there's a lot of programs and offices of the chief entrepreneur who don't actually involve.

People who have been to Silicon Valley at all. And, these, I would suggest are, at best, suboptimal at worst, counterproductive.

Yaniv: A lot of things that make Silicon Valley great, uh, to do with the fact that people come from all over the world, the most ambitious, the best, and the brightest.

So many of them go to Silicon Valley, the US is an immigrant success story. Silicon Valley is even more of an immigrant success story. The stats on the number of first and second generation founders in Silicon Valley are insane, right? So it's not an American phenomenon in terms of the people it is hosted in the U S A.

we're going to talk. A couple of points about the importance of making it easy to immigrate. the US to be fair, doesn't make it that easy to immigrate, but it has enough pull that, to your point, Chris, what that means is there are probably people from your country in Silicon Valley, and some of those people, especially if you make it welcoming for them, will wanna come home. they are a massive asset because they've been there, they've done that. They've immersed themselves in the culture, they've learned from the best, and now they can take a little piece of that, they're a little floating fragment of Silicon Valley and bring that back and seed that at home.

But you're right, Chris, I think that sort of experiences often, if not undervalued, it's at least misunderstood there's not a, thoughtful way of embracing and integrating these people when they do return.

So the next one, as I foreshadowed, is to make it easy to immigrate, and that is the flip side of elevate your expats. again, Silicon Valley is not. A phenomenon that is fueled only, or even primarily by Americans, Silicon Valley is a phenomenon because people came there from all over the world.

So if you wanna be even a bit like Silicon Valley, one of the best ways you can do it is to make your country a really desirable place for people, for talented people, for experienced people to come and do their best work in your country. what often happens though is that for various reasons, countries are not good at this, right?

They, have visa programs that make you jump through a lot of hoops, sometimes it's about protecting local jobs. Sometimes it's just about the natural tendency of bureaucrats to bureaucratize things, and so on. And So there's often a kind of corruption of the immigration system or a kind of distortion perhaps, of the immigration system away from making it easy for these people who can add so much to your economy, to your culture, to your society, to actually come in.

Now smart countries are starting to get wise to this and create visa programs that are easy for people who have the social capital, the actual capital, to come in and enhance the country. I think Portugal's often held up as a good example, and, you know, these countries that have attractive lifestyles and then make it easy for really talented people to come to them.

Those countries will earn a strong dividend from that. And it's certainly something where You know, if you want to be a bit more like Silicon Valley, you really want to capitalize on that. you cannot afford as a minor country, let's say, as not the USA, as not the UK, to have a hostile visa regime because people will simply give up or, never even think of coming to you in the first place.

Chris: Yeah, I think you touched on this earlier, you, the US is not that easy to get into. but the center of gravity and the value prop is so high. I, I remember a colleague at Uber once said to me, if the value prop is high enough, people will crawl over glass to get in. and you know, the US has, achieved that threshold, right?

Especially in some of the, hubs like New York and. Silicon Valley. And so most countries have not reached that threshold. No one's crawling of a glass to get in, and so you just need to make it easy. you mentioned also that some countries have gotten wise to this and made it easier to get in. I would argue not only have they made it easier to get in, they've made it hard to resist.

Right. Dubai and Portugal and others have eliminated capital gains. They give you citizenship for the price of an investment they just make it like, please come in and just take advantage of living here. It's gonna be awesome. Because they know that this is a medium to long-term game of ecosystem building and it's absolutely priceless to get some of these people in the door.

 The next one, and this one I think is one of the more controversial items we have on our list, which is for governments to get out of the way. And what that really means is, The traditional mechanisms and tools that governments try to use to kickstart an ecosystem can actually be the things, the very things that get in the way of startups, these grants, these educational programs, these things that, as a founder, I now need to think about, apply for, get excited for, pause my life for, and fill out lots of paperwork for.

And then once I, get accepted, I have to spend days, weeks, and months of my life doing, and it makes me feel really good. I just got a grant from the Queensland government, or I just got accepted into this program, three four week program where the, government has facilitated all of this education for me and it feels like validation.

It feels like productive work, but it's. The thing that Yaniv and I talk about very often on the show, which is validation from academia, media, and government, instead of the kind of validation that you actually need, which is from customers and users and from commercially savvy smart money. And so these programs, while very well-meaning, and in some cases have produced a helpful leg up for some founders, some of the time can be ultimately very, very distracting and destructive if they're not designed correctly.

So rather than a, grant, you apply for some kind of tax efficiency for the right kind of investment or being in the right kind of geographical area, which happens automatically, or, after the fact. Once you have momentum.

Yaniv: I mean, it's interesting when I think about grants, I think about. Venture capital, right? Because in a sense, what equity investors are making is also a, type of grant, in return for equity, right? sure it's an investment, but it's not a traditional investment because they're investing in a business that has no real enterprise value, yet they're giving you a grant in return for equity.

But, we've talked a lot about, when we think about smart money and dumb money and, different stages of. Startup investment from VCs is that the level of due diligence is different, right? And one way you can tell dumb money is that, you're looking to raise a pre-seed round and you've got investors like crawling up your ass and basically asking you to provide three year projections and give tranches and like paperwork and financial models and all of this stuff.

It's like, you know what? We don't have any of that. We are just trying to make it work here. And if, you can't invest in that, then you're in the wrong business. And so I then take that and I bring it across to grants where again, you've got relatively early stage companies who are busy filling in forms and going through processes and.

You know, in Australia, and I know there are similar initiatives in many countries, we have something called the research and development tax Incentive. And guess what? If you wanna do that properly, you need to add time tracking tools to all your engineers. And you need to make sure that everything that you do is structured as a scientific experiment.

And then you need to engage a big audit and accounting firm to lodge this thing for you. And then if you get audited, you need to then produce all of these time sheets and argue with the government. And you know what? All of this is a massive distraction, a massive waste of time. When you should be focusing on iterating quickly, on focusing obsessively on that thin slice on your customers on disruption, and instead you're being tied up in non-productive paperwork that is effectively a form of due diligence.

So grants themselves aren't bad, but I think it is very difficult for a government to spend taxpayers' money without feeling that they've got the adequate controls in place. And unfortunately, those controls are usually detrimental to the startup. And so you need to be really careful. Like if there's a grant that's low paperwork, if you're lucky enough to live in a country where those sorts of things are available, then fantastic, right?

Free money, it's great. It's like you're getting an investment and you're not even giving away any equity. That's lovely. But understand that usually you're giving away something else, which is your time, and that is actually at an early stage, more valuable than your equity. So be very, very, very careful of that.

Chris: It's almost like, there's smart money, there's dumb money, and then there's the dumbest money. And government is very often the dumbest money. and so just be very careful about that. And the thing is, even if the. paperwork is lightweight and the grant is really well designed. It can just be a kind of distraction, it kind of be a gravity.

Well, for your founders who think that those grants are the way to commercial success and that validation is the validation they need, and it's not. I think these programs that encourage investment in certain geographies or categories or certain risk tolerances, think those are the most efficient forms of government.

Subsidy or grant where you are creating the economic environment for commercial interests to thrive and to benefit. I think when you have bureaucrats creating paperwork and giving go, no go decisions, and not partnering with private investment capital, I think that's when you start to run into a bit of trouble.

Yaniv: I think you're right. But look, honestly, raising capital from VCs is also a massive distraction, right? So a degree of distraction is part of the price you pay to get capital, but I think you need to consider whether the, juice is worth the squeeze, and certainly, it's not validation, it's capital.

Chris: I remember in the early days, and to be fair, this is pre some of the more sophisticated things that are going on in Australia. But in the early days, I had a startup in Australia and was working to try to get some kind of government support, and we spent, hours and hours and hours, days and days and days and the end, they offered to print some flyers for us, and it was just like, are you kidding me?

What is going on? it's a lot, it's a lot better now.

Yaniv: Just want to talk briefly about tax efficiency, because I think this is nuanced, I believe that governments require taxes in order to function, and I'm not opposed to paying tax, but I think it's about structuring your taxes in a way that are not hostile to the creation of these early stage ventures.

And what that usually means is aggressive tax deferral, nobody involved in a startup wants to be paying tax on it in the early days when all it does is burn cash, right? Not the investors, not the founders, not the employees. So the examples of the sorts of things that are really important from a tax efficiency point of view, which is not the case in all countries, and certainly used not to be the case in many countries is not taxing employee stock options on vesting, right? It used to be quite common to tax them on vesting, and then that meant that people were paying a tax bill for options that were quite likely to eventually be worthless, but was certainly completely illiquid.

What did that mean? Companies didn't give away stock options, or employees didn't accept the grants. What did that mean? You didn't have that ownership culture. So that's really toxic. similarly, if investors are having to pay tax on these highly illiquid, speculative investments, that's also really problematic, What you wanna do is actually encourage these investors to invest really early in these startups on the understanding that eventually, The ones that become highly profitable unicorns, hopefully, that have succeeded in disrupting, can become valuable tax paying entities, right? But you don't wanna kind of stifle them, you don't wanna strangle them in the cradle before they have the chance to actually be able to pay meaningful amounts of tax.

And so I think structuring it so that nobody feels that they're gonna have to dip their hand in their pocket early on when they're making a speculative investment. That is the key thing that really works well, in fostering a startup ecosystem.

Chris: Yeah, you reward speculation and then you tax success. if you do it the other way around, you won't get to the success part. I think, Bernie Sanders and, Elizabeth Warren were proposing a, law in the US to tax, vesting, which would've cratered Silicon Valley, which is, yeah, it's crazy, crazy time.

So the next three ideas here require a little bit of intervention and a little bit of thoughtful, nuanced approaches. The, next one we wanted to talk about is finding a way to encourage large corporations and potentially government to be buyers of startup products and startups.

And so, one of the phenomena that I think doesn't get talked about enough in the US and in Silicon Valley is that companies, substantial companies are willing to buy a. From, and ultimately the entirety of startups. and, you very regularly will see very large brands, very large companies buying products, from startups and, very proudly so.

And then when the timing is right, investing in, or then ultimately buying these startups, and you see that happening a lot, lot less in Australia and other smaller ecosystems. These larger companies are risk averse. They don't wanna make the wrong bet. They're concerned these startups might collapse or go away.

They want to build everything in-house, and so on and so forth. they don't have, sophisticated venture arms that are investing in these startups. And so this is a key part of the, production line. Where there's pre-seed and seed and series A and series B, and along that line there are these really important inputs like companies buying products and companies doing strategic investment and companies buying the startups at the end of the production line. And they're just missing these, inputs are missing from the production line.

And so, it's essential to find a way to encourage the companies in your ecosystem to take this behavior, to, to buy from startups, to invest in startups, and to ultimately buy the entire company to add to their portfolio and their strategy.

Yaniv: I think this is a really interesting one, especially the buying from startups. And again, here in Australia, and I suspect that this is true in many places, we have governments that are geared to do the thing that is superficially less risky. And so if they're building an app, they will go to like PWC or, some big company who is very good at putting in a, tender document and charge 20 to $50 million for building an app that should cost half a million dollars it's not a question of money. It's just that the money goes inefficiently to large organizations that might superficially make governments and big business feel more comfortable.

But if you look at their track records, they're actually pretty appalling. So this is a failure of proper governance and risk management, in my view, that equates big with safe and small, with unsafe despite a pretty large body of evidence that that's simply not the case, especially in software and tech.

Chris: Also custom is better and off the shelf is worse. That's also another failure of imagination, right? Because custom means you have to maintain it and you have to iterate on it, and that's not gonna happen. Whereas if you can find a startup that is actually designed well, has a great product strategy and product vision, and you can bet on their app as a going concern, that is often better than trying to custom build a thing.

Yaniv: We're getting to the end of this, folks. The next one is, in a sense the hardest and, really less actionable from the top down, but so, so important, which is changing the culture to being one that celebrates the, taking of big betts effectively and of excellence in execution.

Chris: Yeah, this one is hard and it is, an aspect of, top down planning and, master planning in a way. There needs to be investments in schools, in, cultural programs, media and entertainment that changes mindsets from. you must pass your test to succeed and you must, become a doctor or a violinist to failure is a required part of any success failure should be celebrated, particularly if you learn, to calling out rather than tolerating mediocrity, to teaching entrepreneurship as part of the DNA of people's lives and lifelong learning.

And I think, I really do think this takes, consideration all the way down at like the preschool grade one primary school level all the way through to college, and beyond. And, kind of preempting our next bullet point. This will take a. Time, long times and generations to filter through.

But it's, so, so important and so fundamental to, the attitudes it takes to creating success and creating a Silicon Valley style, ecosystem in your country.

Yaniv: Absolutely. We're kind of going from a, industrial era way of working where it's like, yes, you need study to the test to a knowledge worker era.

Where, you really want to reward people for thinking innovatively And I think it is challenging for education systems to evolve, but to the extent that we're talking about how do governments help, right? Governments tend to run education systems or have strong influence over education systems, and this is one place where we're like, okay, how do we celebrate failure and celebrate success even more?

And how do we call out mediocrity and I guess create a culture where excellence of execution is more important than. Having consistency of outcome. we had an episode last year, one of my favorites, was really about the ways in which startups are like poker. So How do we create a culture that rewards great poker playing rather than kind of playing it safe? and it's not easy. It's not easy, right? when there is so much disconnection between the quality of the input and the ultimate outcome on any given point. but it is really important if you wanna create this culture that actually rewards innovation.

Chris: Education systems do evolve far, far too slowly. And, you know, we've blown past the industrial revolution, but yet the education system is still modeled on that. And we've moved from information memorization and repetition, which was really optimized for the industrial revolution through to information synthesis for the information revolution.

And we've already blown past that. We're now in the AI revolution, right? And being able to synthesize content and, produce reports and analyses the new skill that's required is imagination and asking the right questions.

Yaniv: is fascinating. My, wife is actually a high school teacher and they're having a hell of a time with chat g p t right now, Because what's happening is, although they're trying to incorporate it fundamentally, the mode of assessment, means that students will be tempted to use ChatGPT, and that, in a sense should be encouraged.

But then the question is, how do we test valuable skills that are valuable now that these tools exist? you know, at the moment it's still sort of being treated like plagiarism. Like if you've used ai, then you've cheated. and we need to get to the point where we're like, okay, you are going to learn valuable skills, and we'll be able to differentiate people who are really good using AI and asking these questions from people who are not.

And we're going to teach those skills, but it's not easy. It's not easy at all.

Chris: The question is not how do you defend the test against ai? The question is how do you redesign the test to test things that are relevant in an AI world?

And, is such a, profound and fundamental shift, not just for education, but for hiring and for designing your products and companies moving into the future.

So it's just, it's just profound.

And then the final, trick, the final characteristic, the final consideration that we've got listed here, and I'm sure there are many, many more, for building a Silicon Valley style tech hub in your local community is frankly time and patience.

Everything we've talked about , as is probably obvious to you, will require a great deal of thoughtful, intentional action over time. And by time we mean. Decades and like any platform, We had mentioned at the beginning of this, this is, analogous to building a platform, a tech platform.

The early signs of this are gonna be nascent and non-existent. It's gonna be very, very flat or, um, Hard to see, in the early days until some of this alchemy starts to, kick off. Some of these nuclear reactions start to occur, and then it cascades, and then you start to see hockey stick curves, years down the line.

And I think this is one of the most difficult aspects of this is because governments are designed to survive an election. and people are designed to survive a lifetime. And people don't have a lot of, patience for this kind of thing, but it, does take a long time. Silicon Valley benefited from the Gold Rush, the.com era, the Web 2.0 era, the social media era, the, on demand era.

And now the AI era and actually, sorry, I missed in the middle there. The Silicon era, right? The, in invention of the pc, which is the biggest one. and so there are multiple, multiple waves of, people flooding in and creating. ecosystems and picks and shovels and speculating and mining for, value and, and, success.

And as I said, this goes all the way back to the gold rush in the Silicon Valley area. And so it's, long, long trends, long time horizons.

Yaniv: Yeah. And I've kind of already alluded to this in this episode, which is I, do love gardening as an analogy. And, you know, they talk about the great gardens that were planted by people who would never see their vision fully realized 'cause they were planting oak trees and things like that, that take decades and decades to grow an ecosystem, if you think about it, a garden is a type of ecosystem and ecosystems. Need to be given time. there's no such thing as an instant ecosystem, just add water. And that is frustrating. but once you internalize that, you get a kind of, patience and wisdom that's really valuable.

And of course, it doesn't mean that you have to wait decades to see results. What it means is you will continue to see. Incremental improvement over decades. You cannot speed run your way to the final outcome that you want. but every action you take is a vote in favor of the type of culture and ecosystem and structure that fosters innovation and really drives a huge amount of growth, in your own country.

And so yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, one of the key ingredients that has made Silicon Valley so successful is simply that it's been doing versions of what it's doing for quite a long time. even if you exclude the gold rush, even just going back to that silicon era of the fifties and sixties and seventies, they've been doing tech for well over half a century and very few other places, have even been doing it for 20 years.

So there's just a huge amount of time and compounding that goes into that.

Chris: Now I want to give a bit of a spicy take at the end, which is a caveat that, will be interesting for people to react to. Everything we've discussed here, I think is very worthwhile to think about, to invest in and to act on if you are an ecosystem. Builder. If you are a community builder, if you're a government official, if you're a university administrator, the people who should not be paying attention to this are startup founders.

If you are a startup founder, the last thing you need to be worrying about is building your ecosystem. You should be building your startup. And I see a lot of founders who are distracted by like organizing community events and sitting on committees and advising government programs and whatever the hell else.

And is just another form of distraction. It's just another form of wasted time. You have precious little time to execute on your startup, and you want to remove as much headwind as possible and get as much tailwind as possible, which means Move your ass to a mature ecosystem, whether that's inside your country or outside your country, or focus on tapping into these mature ecosystems.

Don't focus on trying to build the plane while trying to get to your destination. That's my hot take. Do you agree?

Yaniv: I somewhat agree with you. I, feel like, I probably don't entirely live up to that myself. There's this element of, yes, extreme focus is important, but at the same time, if you want good things to happen in your community, then you need to contribute to that community.

So I'm on the fence, let's say here. I, think it's actually a really difficult trade off we had an episode on Pay It Forward, another one of our favorites. It's never gotten a lot of listeners, folks, make us happy. Go listen to the Pay It Forward episode, because that's a really important part of the Silicon Valley ethos, right?

Which is saying, okay, maybe the nuance here, Chris, is it's not about just saying, oh, let's go to community events where we talk about how to build a community and the community and advocating to government. It's about doing concrete things to help each other. Right. And concrete things to lead by example and show what good looks like and celebrate those failures, celebrate those successes and so on.

And I think that's really important, right? This is not about being insular and not engaging with your community. I think it is about how you engage with your community and you know, to do it in a way that strengthens each other.

Chris: Yeah. I think that's a good nuance. I'm not talking about The avoidance of being a good community member. I'm talking about avoiding being a community builder, being someone who is explicitly involved in trying to build the plane and feeling like, oh, if I can just build the plane, then I can fly to this other country and kind of depending on the plane.

Yaniv: Yeah. No, no. Build your bloody startup. Build, your startup a hundred percent.

Chris: Right. So, you know, I, absolutely a, firm believer and advocate for paying it forward, taking a coffee, with someone who might be kind of coming up behind you or looking to partner with you to be a good steward, to show up to a presentation when you're asked to give a talk on something.

These are actions you can take within the community. But the difference, what I'm pointing to is trying to drag that community up and building and spending all that time. Building the community is not your day job. And you need to be very careful because your day job is very precious and, time intensive.

Yaniv: A hundred percent. Okay, Chris, so this has been a good long episode. I think we've, dived pretty deep into what good looks like here, and I hope folks can take some actionable, inspiring stuff away from them. Now, one of the things we talked about was how do we incorporate the knowledge of Silicon Valley expats better into the community?

And I believe we have a, Silicon Valley expat right here on the show with us who is there

to help. So, oh my God, what are the odds? I cannot believe it. so Chris, if, people want to work with you and, learn from that wisdom that, you acquired over in Silicon Valley, what do they need to do?

Chris: Yeah, that's right. Yaniv you can learn more about how I work with startups and help 'em avoid all these dead ends and wasted time. And just fast forward to the, best high growth Silicon Valley style answer as quickly as possible. Check out chris.com/advisory and you can learn more about that there.

Yaniv: Absolutely. Now, folks, don't forget to honor the pact. If you listen to this podcast and you get value from it, please follow us in your podcast listening app and on YouTube, rate and review us and give us a shout out on LinkedIn. It really puts a pep in our step and it helps other people find us.

So if you're getting value from it, help other people get that value too.

Chris: That's right. It helps us to help more founders and and that's really the core mission for the show

Yaniv: All right. That was a fun one, Chris. Thanks so much. Have a good one.

Chris: You too Yaniv See you later guys. Bye-Bye.