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.<\/p>\n
San Francisco today (or \u201cSF\u201d) is treated like a mythical place. It\u2019s common for technology companies (\u201ctech\u201d) — 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.<\/p>\n
Take Bitcoin: when it first appeared, most people ignored it. I raised it when invited to talk about it at roundtables in 2012\u20132013 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\u20132015, when I saw how active the developer community had become and who rented space in my incubator.<\/p>\n
Or look at self-driving cars: for more than two years, they\u2019ve been a fixture on SF\u2019s streets. For outsiders, it\u2019s still a novelty. For locals, it\u2019s already the future.<\/p>\n
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: \u201cthat\u2019s the thing about London\u2026you just never know who\u2019s next to you\u2026washing dishes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Imperial cities like London have long been magnets for ambitious people. In this post-imperial age, it\u2019s safe to say SF is one of those magnet cities. Here, investors famously avoid saying \u201cno\u201d outright, because a failed idea today doesn\u2019t mean the founder won\u2019t 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\u2019s the tinkerers and doo\u2019ers who are at the cutting edge of knowledge. But even if they don\u2019t make it with their next project, founders have unique networks where they uncover information that is not public anywhere.<\/p>\n
That, to me, is the real magic of San Francisco. It\u2019s not the weather, the food, or even the technology. It\u2019s 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\u2019ll understand why this city is addictive to some. And why the new economy so often starts here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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