I’m very much looking forward to hosting Novarica’s “Silicon Valley Innovation Tour” in San Francisco this week. The focus for the event is to provide senior IT leaders with an on-the-ground immersion experience related to innovation: what it is, how it works, and how the Silicon Valley ecosystem is unique in terms that are hard to comprehend from an outside perspective. Incubators, accelerators, VC firms, startups, and mature companies that fight their own cultures to keep innovation alive are all part of the experience. Tellingly, we were oversold for the week. A summary from an earlier event is always an interesting review of what we do.
Last year on an earlier venture here, one of the speakers shared an interesting tidbit with the group: In the Valley, he said, “there are only two degrees of separation… everyone knows everyone else.” This helps to explain how ideas, resources, and funding flow with Darwinian efficiency, and with surprising speed.
This was brought home to me when I was out to the San Francisco Symphony yesterday afternoon with my son and his wife, both research scientists working for startups in the area. A fourth person joined us in the box and, at intermission, we struck up a conversation. She arrived in the area from Boston three weeks ago to head the HR function for a startup that is focused on optical computing (Round B funding in hand). When electricity moves too slowly this might be a valuable thing for AI and machine learning. The conversation moved between music and computing, people we know in the area, and a wide range of general networking. We also discussed if optical computing has any implications for quantum computing in the future.
It’s hard to know now if they will be successful, of course, but they could well be on our agenda when we return for our next tour in August. And that’s how it happens. If you aren’t on the ground, you can’t see how the ideas and concepts emerge and how the flow of insight begins.
This was also another great testimony to the connections between music, math, and computing. Dvorak was terrific, by the way. I wish the intermission had lasted a little longer.
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