What London Can Learn From Silicon Valley

Finding investment is now seen as something feasible, compared with say five-ten years ago, although we’re still pretty far away from San Jose’s flip-flop sporting VCs lounging around in cafés, chatting casually with potentially investable up and coming Entrepreneurs.  Of course we’ve got many cultural issues to contend with, the UK in general has never been a great one for ambition or believing anything is possible.

Have confidence in your idea. 

Our culture directs us more towards the reasons why something won’t work rather than the reasons it will.  For this reason I have stopped watching the news, which has positively transformed my mind into a better place and I’ve become very choosy about who I talk to about my ideas.  Having confidence in what you are doing is very important, you don’t want to be vulnerable to people’s inane criticisms, which are rarely useful or constructive.  Having a select few people who you trust to help you refine your business ideas, without ripping them to pieces for the sake of convincing themselves they’re on Dragons Den, is vital. 

Select a few people you trust to help you refine your business ideas.

This is perhaps where London isn’t as far ahead as it could be, or will become.  As Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) said earlier in a speech: “If you don’t accept failure it stops people from taking the first step”.  Whilst he praised London for being accepting of failure he also agreed Silicon Valley was better in that respect.  He sees opportunity in London though for great idea generation due to it being a “culturally diverse, creative city”.  Perhaps the only problem then is how to turn these ideas into tangible businesses, as currently there is no real structure facilitating this.  As things stand it’s all down to the Entrepreneur to work out each step of the way for themselves, carefully weaving around the sharks to protect their business.

“If you don’t accept failure it stops people from taking the first step.”

In Silicon Valley no one is scared to try new things, if it doesn’t work they try again, and do it better.  It’s a place where failure is seen as a very positive thing, it shows character and experience, thereby bringing the person closer to success than ever before.  This is possibly the key difference in the London and Silicon Valley mentalities. 

In Silicon valley, failure earns you some respect, whereas as much as we’d like to think the same goes for London, it doesn’t.  London is still a city where people generally only talk about their successes and brush their failures aside, even if the failures bring more interesting discussion, it’s deemed safer not to mention them.  I think this is where we could learn most from Silicon Valley. 

Discuss about your successful ideas, as well as your failures.

If we could transform our city into a community which embraces failure, praises those who try, assists those who try however we can then, we could dynamically change the likelihood of producing some Google’s and Apple’s in our own back yard.  Maybe though, all it will take is time, I’d like to think that we are slowly moving towards that end, with enough highly positive, driven, ambitious Entrepreneurs who will become the ones others follow, creating the culture that they want to be part of, themselves. 

Henry Mitchell is a social Entrepreneur and founder of The 1 Month Project, a collaboration/crowdsourcing platform created for inciting discussion on social, entrepreneurial and economic issues as well as instigating a series of “1 Month” projects, each designed to impact and change the world, if even in a small way. 

Photo from http://bit.ly/w2r1zH

Tags: Entrepreneurship, Advice for Startups