During my undergraduate days at the University of Sydney, I experimented with media. First with a newspaper, then with an e-zine, we found a niche covering student politics. One of my major sources at the time told me why it was valuable and that was because in politics, information is power. This is a phrase that has stuck with me, and rings even more true now, after sixteen years in Silicon Valley.
San Francisco today (or “SF”) is treated like a mythical place. It’s common for technology companies (“tech”) — startups specifically (“little tech”) — to be headquartered here even if few employees live in the city. Many of my most successful and intelligent friends insist on staying within SF proper rather than the suburbs. Those who moved away know that SF is still the office if you want to make money in tech. Why? Because here, too, information is power.
Take Bitcoin: when it first appeared, most people ignored it. I raised it when invited to talk about it at roundtables in 2012–2013 with Australian politicians and business leaders, and they laughed in disbelief. But in SF, you could feel the conviction of early adopters. For me, the turning point came in 2014–2015, when I saw how active the developer community had become and who rented space in my incubator.
Or look at self-driving cars: for more than two years, they’ve been a fixture on SF’s streets. For outsiders, it’s still a novelty. For locals, it’s already the future.
My father once told me a story about London in the 1950s. After a party, he was washing dishes next to another guest, and they struck up a conversation. The reason they took such a long time to clean the dishes is because of how fascinated my father was. That other guest commanded a battleship during the Second World War! My father remarked: “that’s the thing about London…you just never know who’s next to you…washing dishes.”
Imperial cities like London have long been magnets for ambitious people. In this post-imperial age, it’s safe to say SF is one of those magnet cities. Here, investors famously avoid saying “no” outright, because a failed idea today doesn’t mean the founder won’t succeed tomorrow. Everyone understands the importance of respecting the entrepreneur across the table because they might build the next big thing. At the very least, they will discover something because it’s the tinkerers and doo’ers who are at the cutting edge of knowledge. But even if they don’t make it with their next project, founders have unique networks where they uncover information that is not public anywhere.
That, to me, is the real magic of San Francisco. It’s not the weather, the food, or even the technology. It’s the serendipitous flow of information, overheard, stumbled upon, discovered in chance encounters. For those ready to act, that information becomes power. If you think of entrepreneurship and venture capital as factors of production, you’ll understand why this city is addictive to some. And why the new economy so often starts here.
