THE TRUTH about what makes Silicon Valley great?
Why a village like Iten in Kenya can beat a city like Mumbai in becoming the next Silicon Valley?
In June this year, I set out on a personal adventure — a journey of self-discovery.
As a coach, I am aware that this term self-discovery gets thrown around quite loosely. Infact, as a coach, I was also victim to this pattern — using terms and words that sound ‘cool’ without fully understanding it’s layers of nuance. This ignorance came at a price. A price that was so high, it would leave you in debt for the rest of your life. The debt I speak of is the debt of not knowing who you are or even worse, not recognizing the ‘numbness’ present in your life.
I was there — numb and feeling a deep sense of loss, so much so, I often confused it with depression and sometimes even languish. But it wasn’t either. It was the numbness that resulted from showing up for others more than I listened to myself.
So desperate to rectify this, I set out on a journey of self-discovery in its truest sense. A quest to answer a single question: what are the identities (career, social, emotional, spiritual, and physical) with which I show up in the world and what is the price I am paying for each of those identities? It was an incredibly fascinating journey but this blog isn’t about this journey. This piece is about what makes Silicon Valley the Greatest place on Earth for Entrepreneurs.
Here is some context setting. I have been living in India for the past decade and during this time I have worn many hats, including entrepreneur, performance coach, content creator, sports scientist and psychologist. When I set out in search of the answers around my identity, little did I realise that I was going to stumble upon the best secret to success. A secret that isn’t really a secret. I had witnessed the same in Iten Kenya a decade earlier but just never connected the dots.
I had been traveling through the Bay Area (Silicon Valley) for almost six weeks meeting dozens of people. It is a space with so much potential that honestly, a random chance meeting in a coffee shop (Backyard Brew in Palo Alto or Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View) could not only change the course of your life, it could potentially shift how the world functions. Case in point, Google, Facebook, Paypal, Adobe, Salesforce, Apple etc. All of which had its humble beginnings in the Valley.
From the moment I entered the Bay Area, the energy felt different. It had a negative side but on the positive side, there was this unmistakable optimism that obviously came at the price of work life balance. Despite this, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it is that made this place so awesome?
There was this obvious answer. The long list of hugely successful companies. Perhaps a layer below, the quantum of millionaires that live in every square kilometer. But this wasn’t the reason. Hidden in plain sight, it eluded my every attempt to discover it.
After six weeks in Silicon Valley, I was ready to return home. The answer to my question still eluded me though that mystery hit me like a ton of bricks within the first 48 hours of landing back in Mumbai, India.
I arrived in India open to the possibility of relocating from Mumbai. This meant I had to work quickly to tie up loose ends, set up meetings to create systems and consciously weigh up this possibility. So I did what I thought would work. I reached out to a bunch of people I thought could help me evaluate my options and set up systems efficiently. It was nothing out of the ordinary but the energy back home felt markedly different to what I had just experienced in the Valley.
And then the realization dawned on me.
The Valley has a reputation. Successful entrepreneurs and businesses are born in the Valley. It’s the metaphorical melting pot. The right person in the right place with the right tools putting in the right effort, and sprinkled with a touch of serendipity.
This perfect storm is not by coincidence but engineering. Engineered to precision exactly like the way the Kenya runners do it in Iten. Bring the best of the best together and be invested in their success, because their success contributes to the reputation of the city.
In Silicon Valley, people are invested in each other’s success because the reputation of the Valley is based on the quantum of success stories that arise from there.
In Iten, Kenya — The Home of the Runner, runners help runners because the quantum of success stories for runners is what makes Iten special place to train.
In Mumbai, like in so many other cities in the world, you will find successful people, but what you may struggle to see and definitely feel is the collective energy of a community desperately wanting another person to succeed. A person they may not know too well.
Why? Because the reputation of the city isn’t based on a random person’s success. It’s about who you know, not what you know.
This is the single reason why there are only a handful of places in the world like this. Places where the reputation of the town / city in combination with its residents attitude towards inclusivity makes it a space boiling over with possibility. A space that merges reality with your wildest conceivable imagination.
Iten was the first place I discovered like this. Silicon Valley was the second.
My advice: if you are looking to relocate, search for places like these. You could fast track your growth by ten years.
Follow Shayamal on IG: @shayamal
