Why Korea (or anywhere else) can’t create another Silicon Valley
My personal mission statement (at least for the chapter of my life I’m in now) is to take Korean/Asian innovation to the world outside. That’s what I do in my day job - We are integrating our product with Google infrastructure and hopefully we’ll launch globally later on - and that’s also what I do in my off-work hours, from writing this blog to organizing the first-ever premier pan-Asian conference where the East meets the West.
In doing so, I am faced with this question a lot: Will it be possible to create another Silicon Valley, let’s say in Asia? And I’m certainly not the only one who asks such question. Paul Graham instantly pops into my mind.
All this time, I have been someone who would say the notion of “one and only one Silicon Valley in the world” is silly. Look at Microsoft, Myspace, QQ, Nintendo, Nokia - none of them are Valley companies - I would argue. But after my extended stay in the Bay Area this time, I now find myself believing, maybe Silicon Valley *is* a thing of its own and it is virtually impossible to duplicate it.
Why? For me, it seems to come down to this single virtue: the accessibility.
During my stay in the Valley, I was lucky enough to meet with some of the “venture celebrities” I had seen only on news. As they say, Valley is a small society, where everyone kind of knows everyone else. And people are not merely “open” to make intros, they even sometimes seem eager to make those intros. Somehow they want to open doors for me. So what happens is, while I’m meeting someone, if I mention this person’s name that I saw on tech news in the morning (whom I would have never expected to be able to meet if I was in Korea), the guy I”m meeting with goes like, “Oh, I did my previous startup with him and hung out with him in the bar the other night - would you like to meet him?” And I’m like, damn, was it that easy?
Try the same thing in, let’s say, Korea. You want to meet the “movers and shakers” of the industry? You will probably have to meet their secretaries first. You have this crazy idea that you think will change the world? You will likely find there’s not enough capital or other necessary ingredients that will let you build a business around that idea. So the next thing you do is to bring that idea to this established company, most likely a portal or a big company’s IT arm. If they don’t understand what the heck you are talking about (which is the most likely scenario), they will basically tell you to get a real job. If they do see the potential, they will either try to rip you off by offering a cheap labor opportunity on an exclusive business deal, or copy the idea altogether.
Of course I shouldn’t generalize the picture too much. But I’m not miscarrying the reality too much either. It indeed is so different. The accessibility of the Valley just isn’t there anywhere else, especially Asia. None of this is a secret, I know - we’ve read about the Valley stories so many times. And it’s not like I came to the Valley for the first time either. But knowing something and living it are completely different, and for however brief time I was in the Valley this time, I “lived it” and it feels so different.
High accessibility means higher chance for smart people to bump into each other and bounce off ideas with each other. World-changing innovations often come from such intellectual interactions. As long as the Valley maintains its high accessibility, I believe it will remain as the mecca of tech innovations. By now you would have understood at least one reason why Korea can’t create another Silicon Valley, and for that matter, how to create one.
