

It requires entrepreneurs to build massive organizations, user bases, and businesses, and to doso at a dizzyingly rapid pace. Most of the impact and value creation that Silicon Valley companies produce actually occurs during this scaleup phase.īuilding great, world-changing companies requires more than just building a cool app and raising some money. When you examine the history of iconic Silicon Valley companies, they quickly grew their customers, revenue, and organizational scale to fit a global market. Given the parallels with military and sports strategies, we can call this blitz-scaling.Īnd to some degree, this is not a surprise. When you scale at speed, you can capture the market quickly and also outmaneuver potentially global competition. Two areas of the world do this well with many companies: Silicon Valley and some cities in China. As the networked age has increased the competitive importance of speed, the key secret is now scaling up at speed. So, why does Silicon Valley continue to produce so many industry-transforming companies? The secret has moved past startups to scaleups. And, the belief in entrepreneurship is spreading everywhere in the world - creating a receptive culture in many cities. Through the internet (as with this article!), essential startup knowledge is now available to enterprising entrepreneurs everywhere.

There has even been a global expansion of some of the more subtle elements such as a culture acceptance of the potential failure of bold ventures.

And, technology companies have R&D centers in many areas of the world. There are bright young technical graduates from universities around the world. Today, many parts of the world are rich in all of the necessary ingredients. However, Silicon Valley is no longer unique in its ability to launch startups.

So, the explanation for the creation of massive new industries is this: Silicon Valley is great because it has a unique ability to create startups. The nearly universal explanation for Silicon Valley’s success: entrepreneurs, venture capital, technical universities, existing technology companies - which all lead to launching great startups. Silicon Valley has become a global leader in innovation, technology, and new industry creation.
