Darren Fu

Thoughts pre-trip

I was in completely over my head before flying off for San Franciso. This was going to be Silicon Valley, the place where it all started for tech and also the place where it's all happening right now. The best and biggest tech giants, VCs and accelerators, startups and CS universities were all going be there in this small cut-out of California. How could one place even have all this going on at once?

The possibilities of what could be done in Silicon Valley appeared to be limitless. How could I as some uni student from Australia make the most out of this one month trip? What might I contribute and would it be possible for me to take anything back to Brisbane?

This was honestly all just too much to think about, really. The best that I could do was to pack all my things, and strap myself in for the ride.

Getting there

For my journey to SF I was part of the second batch of San Francisco Startup Adventurers sent by the newly rebranded (and formerly IdeaHub) UQ Ventures. I was amongst a group of 19 odd bright, optimistic and quirky young entreprenuers ready to take on California.

We flew 12 hours from Brisbane to Los Angeles, and then another hour north to get to San Francisco. On the flight I could barely sleep, and ended up reading through a big chunk of Zero to One by Peter Thiel. This perhaps turned out to be one of the best introductions to startup culture in the Bay Area I could get before actually arriving there. Quoting parts of the book itself:

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from social bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised in the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business.

People today are indefinitely optimistic, and this is what leads to the concept of a 'lean startup'.... But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won't help you find the global maximum.

We have to find our way back to a definite future, and the Western world needs nothing short of a cultural revolution to do it .... A startup is the largest endeavour over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of chance.

In the eyes of Thiel, the world has, with the exception of computers, essentially stalled in technological advancement since the mid 1900s. We stopped discovering new technologies to propel societal growth, and with that came the modern idea of lean businesses with no true goals in mind other than to compete efficiently to survive in an 'indefinitely optimistic' economy.

Tech startups are the way out of this, and are our tickets to propelling modern society forwards. They have flexibility on a level that can't be afforded by established businesses, and are out to make 10x level disruptions that create new categories of abundance for society.

I also watched General Magic, which was also a great primer on the culture in Silicon Valley.