Myopia

Was in San Francisco for a couple of days.  My wife and I spent a month there last February. Since last February, it seems like there are less homeless walking around. They are still there, just seemed to be less of them.  I saw no human poop on the street and no used needles. I could be wrong since I only walked in a limited area this trip.  Maybe this trip was myopic for me.

I did try a new restaurant, Mister Jiu’s.  It was pretty darn good and I would encourage anyone to go there.  Maybe the best and most creative Chinese food I have ever had.  As a matter of fact, it was now that I reflect on it.

I was at a conference.  One thing that struck me was the pure myopia of a lot of the panelists.  There are only two or three business schools in the world, Harvard, Wharton, Stanford.   Forget about it if you went to Chicago Booth or Kellogg. One startup ecosystem, the Bay Area.  The blockchain panel I listened to was interesting and frightening at the same time.  No one really understood what makes capital markets tick and no one had heard of Cumberland Mining, yet they were talking about trading.  They didn’t realize the largest crypto traders and largest capital markets were in Chicago-and forget about NYC since those are old school retail markets.

When it came to politics, no one acknowledged or thought critically about what the core reasons for the Trump election or Brexit were. They assume it’s racism, hate, elite white guys, and uneducated people that voted for it.  The idea that a government could over regulate and over infiltrate your life is not within the realm of possibility for them.  For their businesses, they rationalized how they could/would discriminate against someone that thought differently from them.

Their concept of diversity is super narrow.  It’s paint by number and not paint by different ideas.

There might be lots of reasons for this but one that I can think of is that the ecosystem is dominated by engineers.  I love engineers because they bring a lot of discipline to things.  Engineers think differently.  They see a problem and try and fix it.  They love process.  If you follow the same process over and over and over you are guaranteed success.  But, that discipline can bring myopia that doesn’t allow you to entertain randomness.

The great gains in entrepreneurship and in human society are made by people that don’t follow the traditional path.  It’s messy.   Human creativity is random.  The great investments are made by contrarians, going against the herd.

The thing that will hurt Silicon Valley is not high rents.  The thing that will hurt Silicon Valley is lack of acceptance and driving people away.  Today, there is a high opportunity cost to be paid for thinking differently.  That will benefit other ecosystems should they choose to look beyond their borders, be tolerant and accepting.