Blind optimism – The entrepreneurial soul of The San Francisco Bay Area

- by Kristian Brøndum

This entry is based on my experiences from one week in San Francisco and Silicon Valley…


So here I am – in San Francisco, California. Only 45 minutes away from the innovative hotspot of the world, Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is filled with large corporations, venture capitalist firms, governmental agencies and consultants. All of these are attracted to one mutual thing: the ecosystem of the San Francisco Bay Area.
What is a business ecosystem? According to Wikipedia it is an economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals. How to describe this particular ecosystem then? Well, it starts with the individuals. People in this area have a very different mentality compared to what I am used to in Denmark. First of all, people in this area seem to have incorporated what I would call “the American Dream” mentality, meaning a strong believe in the possibility of prosperity and success. Because of this, people are not afraid of taking risks especially when it comes to startups. Contrary to Denmark, people in this area are extrovert and very open to sharing; they meet up at different events, co-working spaces or cafes and pitch their business ideas to each other. They do not mind sharing information and they all seem to have a “blind optimism” approach to entrepreneurship, making everyone wanting to do startups: leaving your job and saying that you are going to start your own thing is highly respected – it is even considered to be cool! The online startup community called StartupDigest has the slogan “Life is too short to work at a boring company. We believe that anyone should have the option to work with a smaller team, work on new & bigger challenges, and make a bigger impact on the world” and I think this tells a lot about the perception of entrepreneurship and startups over here.


Entrepreneurs with success are seen as rock stars; they are worshiped and adored, even though many of them have failed numerous times in the past. Failure in startups is not a bad thing over here - not at all. Regarding startups, failure equals experience and the willingness to risk something in order to gain a whole lot more. Some investors will not even consider investing in you, if you have not tried to fail at least once! 


Speaking of investors; this leads me to the other part of the ecosystem, the organizations. Some investors functions between the entrepreneurs and the funding firms (in the value chain), as other investors are wealthy business men, who already has made a fortune, making investments of their own funds, e.g. angel investors (also called business angels or informal investors). And there is a lot of investors and capital in the San Francisco Bay Area! 
Other mentionable organizations are the universities. Some of these are even private universities, for example Stanford University, which is dependent on private funding, e.g. from entrepreneurs, corporations etc. The university functions as a private research company, which attracts the brightest talents from around the world and feeds the university with great new business ideas. Finally, the area is populated by many of the largest corporations in the world. 


Now, the million dollar question is, if you can copy this ecosystem to other places, for example Denmark? My answer would be no. You cannot copy the American mentality, the entrepreneurial soul, the entrepreneurialism and all the organizations around here. In Denmark, failure in startups is definitely not considered a good or positive thing. Instead, having a “secure” job is more appreciated than being an entrepreneur – at least in the early phase. And this mentality in the Danish culture makes it very hard to copy the ecosystem of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, which many governments have tried to do over and over again in recent years. 


But is the ecosystem only fostering good things out here? No. I would argue that the described mentality and the ecosystem foster a lot of hopeful, so called “entrepreneurs”, who just want to do what all others do – making businesses and hoping to be the next Facebook or Google etc. I went to a Lean Startup event called Blue Door Lab in Berkeley and was very much surprised to hear the “business ideas” people pitched. These ideas were of questionable quality, at least from my academic point of view. These people were not entrepreneurs because they had a good idea to solve a problem in the world. Rather, they were “entrepreneurs” because of necessity and because of the aforementioned entrepreneurial soul, which is in the air. Now, being an entrepreneur of necessity is not always a bad thing. However, what I experienced that night in Berkeley was not impressive; it was somewhat kind of sad. Maybe these people are a product of the ecosystem.  


So, is it even worth trying to copy this ecosystem? Yes, very much indeed…!