An interesting question that gets asked a lot, and one I definitely asked myself as I uprooted my family from a place where we were content to reside, is “Why is Silicon Valley the tech capital of the world?” This question sits in the middle of two other questions most people that work here eventually ask themselves, “How did Silicon Valley come to be?” and “Where is the next Silicon Valley?”
Is it the weather? The high performing, globally relevant institutions of higher learning? Is it access to Venture Capital? Is it the cultural norms of the locals? Is it just something in the water?
The short answer that I have come to after working here for close to two decades is that it really is about a buzzword I hear bandied about frequently. It is about all of those things, it is about an ecosystem. I came to this realization when I started to think about “Silicon Valley” in comparison to hubs for other industries. The one I looked into the most was suggested to me by my 14 year old daughter (12 at the time), not directly but through her actions. The kid couldn’t stop singing Broadway songs and watching them on Youtube. As we all know, there is only one Broadway.
One thing that Silicon Valley and Broadway have in common is a sort of nebulous beginning. When did Silicon Valley start? Arun Rao, author of A History of Silicon Valley, argues that to understand how Silicon Valley became what it is one has to start by understanding the dynamics of the Wild West.
“There now seems to be agreement among scholars that Silicon Valley started in the early years of the 20th century, meaning that behaviors normally associated with Silicon Valley were pioneered back then. I feel that one should go even further back. As one analyzes how various waves of business got started one realizes that the one thing they have in common is a spirit of the Wild West. The Wild West’s eccentric and independent character is the predecessor to all the inventors and gurus of Silicon Valley.” (pg 11, A History of Silicon Valley 2nd Edition by Arun Rao and Piero Scaruffi)
When I read this I almost want to dismiss it out of hand. I read this line of thought to be more about the fetishization of the “Wild West” that Hollywood has fueled for decades than about the actual facts of what the Wild West was in practice. The Wild West was a violent place, not some cradle of renaissance men. As an example, an adult who lived in San Francisco in 1865 was living with a 1 in 203 chance of being murdered. For a roughly 15 year period there was a murder rate of 31 per 100,000 people while in 2019 there were 46 homicides with a population of 840,000. This “all bets are off” and rugged individualism is not what led to Silicon Valley.
However, when I think about it a little more and forget about that version of the Old West, I can see his point. I grew up in a small rural community in Central California that was populated with the descendants of Westward Expansion in the agricultural industry. And while I disagree that saloon running faro dealers, snake oil salesmen, gold panners and gunslingers are where the story starts, I do believe that the tireless work ethic, teamwork and focus on a common goal that was established by ranch hands, fearless mail carriers and real cowboys can partly explain how Silicon Valley came to be.
Meanwhile, Broadway started on a completely different street, Nassau Street, in 1750. It was here that Owners/Actors Walter Murray and Thomas Kean put on the first musical in Manhattan, The Beggar’s Opera. Not long after this the country was gripped in a Revolutionary War and theater in Manhattan ceased existence until 1798, the year that the 2,000 seat Park Theater came into existence on Chatham Street.
In effect, Broadway didn’t start on Broadway or even in Midtown Manhattan. Today Broadway is comprised of 41 professional theaters, all with at least 500 seats, located in Midtown Manhattan. Just like in Silicon Valley, which started as a reference to the Santa Clara Valley in the South Bay and has stretched to include parts of the East Bay, Peninsula and San Francisco, only three of the 41 theaters are actually on Broadway.
And just like in Silicon Valley, anyone that has ever played a role in a stage production will tell you that it is among the most demanding things a human being can endeavor to do. My only experience with this is participating in a benefit performance of Bay Area legend Ron Lytle’s Christmas in Oz. I played a nameless Kansan in the first part of the story and remembering the queues for when to smile, who to greet, where and when to exit all took great amounts of concentration for an untrained actor. This was all just the first minute of the show, forget about the intricate dances and song lyrics to remember when I later appeared as a citizen of Oz!
In order to make this happen, the entire cast of about 20 adults and 12 children spent three to five hours together, four to five days a week for about six weeks. All that prep work and I still can’t dance! But I digress, imagine the amount of time a Broadway cast has to put in to nail the precision required to play even the smallest role. According to Play Bill, it is eight hours a day, six days a week for six weeks.
It takes a similar focus to deliver world changing products. If we are thinking about Silicon Valley and Broadway as analogous, my job was probably most like a stagehand. I wasn’t coding software, I was behind the scenes helping to build the infrastructure that the actors, the software engineers, used as a stage for the performance. But all of us, stagehands and actors, business people and engineers, were working insane hours at Facebook and the same is true of Broadway performances. Every single one of these roles is important to the end result.
I was in the office at least 10 hours a day, five days a week but there were high water days when I was there much longer. To extend the analogy further this is like tech rehearsals that happen the last two weeks before the play goes live. Once, at Facebook, we had several deployments going on in different time zones and due to circumstances that we could not control I ended up sitting in the office, with a short 4 hour nap in a conference room for 36 straight hours. Tech rehearsals can last way into the wee hours of the morning, too.
Beyond an insane work ethic and dedication to your craft, there are other similarities between Broadway and Silicon Valley. There is a huge funnel of talent in the local area for each. UC Berkeley, Stanford, University of Santa Clara and San Jose State all have top notch Technology and Business programs. In New York City, you have Columbia, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Julliard that all have Performing Arts programs that are among the best in the world.
These schools put out Executives, Engineers, Actors, Singers, Producers, MBAs, Lawyers and more that are educated specifically to push the local industries in bold directions. While Silicon Valley attracts the top talent in the world from many areas, the schools most tapped for talent, as a 2017 study by HiringSolved shows, are UC Berkeley and Stanford. It’s no surprise, then, that the top school for Broadway talent, according to Play Bill, is NYU with Julliard not far behind.
Another major part of the ecosystem is the role of “money man.” In Silicon Valley there are legendary Venture Capital firms like Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark. These are the people who invested in game changing companies that I have worked at such as Facebook, Square and Dropbox.
On Broadway, there are primarily three companies that own and run the theaters. They are Shubert Organization, which owns 17 theaters, Nederlander Organization, which owns nine theaters, and Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five theaters. These companies fund the productions of everything from Cats to Annie, Kinky Boots to Mean Girls.
Both Broadway and Silicon Valley have spread across the country and globe. I have seen the Broadway touring cast of Legally Blonde in Folsom, California and I have traveled to visit Square colleagues in Atlanta, Georgia. But the heart of what makes Broadway and Silicon Valley what they are is still New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area.
One side effect of all this interconnectedness is that the actors of the various productions, and the engineers of the tech companies, frequently visit one another and draw inspiration. Facebook employees go to visit Google employees and break bread at the company provided eateries that exist at each campus. Elite actors will go and watch other elite actors, elite stage hands go to see the handiwork of other elite stage workers. People who do similar work meet up away from the office and share tips.
In Silicon Valley, there are meet ups of entrepreneurs in hotel lobbies pitching their ideas to other entrepreneurs. I have attended one in Palo Alto, another in Menlo Park. It is like Shark Tank but no cameras, down to Earth and technology focused. A large part of the Infrastructure team at Square worked at Yahoo! at the same time that I did. We became a strong team fast because of this shared history. While we hadn’t worked together directly, we all knew a lot of the same people and remembered some of the mistakes we had seen as well as a lot of good ideas for how to build a juggernaut.
When I worked at Dropbox, I was surrounded by folks I had worked with at Facebook. In this case, we had all worked together and that shared history made adapting to a new company a breeze. I had even been recruited to join by a former colleague, another common occurrence in Silicon Valley. If you see a company that looks like an interesting place to work, it is possible to get there as long as you have someone you know who works there.
This interconnectedness leads to a familiarity amongst compatriots. It makes the hard conversations easier to have. It makes the celebrations more intimate and comfortable. My boss at Square used to refer to this as the “Flotilla Effect.” It was like we were all in an ever growing, virtual floating city. It is an ecosystem of human beings with a similarly honed vision for what success means in their specific niche of a complex industry.
Because it is about ecosystems, there will always be one Broadway. The same applies to Silicon Valley. If you want to be part of the ecosystem that drives the future of technology, you are going to have to find your way out West for at least one tour of duty.