Where the Wild Things Are…

I hope among our readers there are a few who also get time to read the dailies now and then. Anyone notice the coverage of microfinance gone wrong in Andhra Pradesh? Most newspapers, including The Times of India, is finding some editorial space for it almost everyday. Much of what I wrote in last month’s column is now playing out in real life and that is sad.

This past month, an interesting development of sorts in the U.S. caught my eye. Dan Lyons wrote in Newsweek how Silicon Valley was not addressing serious challenges and its entrepreneurs were wasting time building stupid companies like Zynga (Farmville, anyone?) and Facebook (You are not on the moon). He added that the Valley had become a casino, where smart kids arrived hoping to make an easy fortune building pointless companies like Twitter (140 characters!), unlike the people who built the old-guard companies like Intel and Apple.

In more words than needed, he called Silicon Valley nothing more than ‘silly’ valley, where the new-age entrepreneurs were not building entities that are tackling challenges that could fundamentally alter the economy and/or how people live.

Among the many voices that came out swinging against Lyons was that of Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, that crusader of entrepreneurs down on the West Coast. He retorted how Twitter and Facebook could not be dismissed as mere diversions and that this issue sounded more like an ‘us-hardware’ and ‘you-software’ people issue more than anything else.

I tend to agree with that. You cannot put innovations from two different eras against each other and say, look, one party did something more substantial. Each innovation was as crazy in its time as it was supposed to be. While the microchip changed the world as we knew it in the last century, the Facebooks and Twitters are also dynamically changing the world we live in today. I have always been an unflinching proponent of bricks and mortar businesses, but even I realize that the township of today is being built on a wired world.

While I was reading up on all this, another realization dawned upon me. What is it that the Valley does right to have all these companies sprouting up? From the times of Apple and Cisco to the more recent PayPal, Pandora and why, Twitter, the Valley has always thrown up firms at a higher rate than other such hubs in the world. Why?

Among the usual spiel of ‘government support, ‘culture’ and whatever other clichés abound, I think there is one fundamental difference. That Valley has just too many crazies floating around. You know, the rebels, the thinkers, the mad men. There are people there who are trying out new things everyday even when not needed and when they are not tackling the big challenges, as Lyons put it.

I mean, last I heard, there was Google trying to make cars that drove themselves. Why on earth does Google, a giant on the Internet, need to build something like that? Like Arrington put it, because it can!

We need some of these crazies in this country. Men with stupid ideas and the wildest dreams who want to do nothing more than upstage the market and the old guard.

AUGUST SHARK is a once-failed, second-time successful bootstrapper who resides in Mumbai. He can be contacted at august@stumpspeak.com.

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