Ask Baudouin: Background and Startup Ecosystem

Baudouin de Hemptinne is the Director of Wallonia- Belgian Trade Commission San Francisco and Digital Wallonia San Francisco. The following is a translated interview he did for Digital Wallonia.


Hello Baudouin, could you present yourself in a few words?

The most important thing you have to know about me is that I am first and foremost a sailor. Putting that aside, I started as a lawyer, licensed in in notary and finance and worked as an interest rate trader on an exchange floor for a bank where I had to develop counterintuitive reflexes.

I then joined a Walloon SME and had an extraordinary 10 year experience there. The “startup spirit” was predominant and it gave a sense of meaning to all of our actions. This SME started and grew with the support of the Walloon Region and eventually went public (IPO). I was able to learn the road to a company’s success by living it myself.

During this same time, I had also joined an entrepreneurial adventure concerning a do-it-yourself store and participated in the growth and final sale of the enterprise.

But as I began by saying, I’m a sailor, so I decided to leave Belgium and spend 16 months sailing around the world with my family. During this time I also took the opportunity to join humanitarian projects in Africa and the Azores.

Upon my return to Belgium, I felt the need to still discover Asia and to put my professional experience at the service of others. AWEX offered me this fulfilling opportunity. I left to live for five years in South Korea where I helped our companies take advantage of the free exchange signed between the EU and Korea during my time there.

I left the Asian continent in 2013 to join the American continent, or more precisely, San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.

San Francisco is the one of the main cities for digital technology and for startups. What characterizes innovation in San Francisco? What is your analysis of the local ecosystem?

San Francisco is not one of the cities, but The City, where startups are born. This city is smaller than Brussels when you look at population, but it has been the birthplace of Google, Apple, Facebook, Intel, WhatsApp, Twitter, Sun Microsystems, Tesla Motors, etc. The entire tech world has their eyes riveted on this city. Many would like to duplicate in their own countries, but with no success so far.

Often I am questioned on the “how” and the “why” of the global success of San Francisco. An analogy with Peter Wohleben’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees, has been very instructive for me in understanding this penomenon. He introduces us to the wild forest and teaches us its surprising adaptation, masterful inventiveness, codes of conduct, and community structure.

When you take this concept from nature and apply it to other ecosystems, it is clear that San Francisco resembles a wild forest in which the elements come together randomly to give birth to new forms of life.

In opposition to the model of the wild forest, there is the “agriculture” system which uses a controlled planting system, water, and fertilizer. Corn will always produce more corn! This model has been similarly used to create companies, allowing us to produce efficiently, cheaply, and profitably, but it does not encourage innovation.

San Francisco and the Silicon Valley combine three top universities, companies and startups (more than 30,000), venture capitalists, entrepreneurial culture and values, and a climate. It’s all these elements together that has given birth to this wild forest over the years. This type of natural development takes a lot of time and that’s why San Francisco is still — whether we like it or not — the global center of innovation and the starting point for good practices adopted around the world.

If we use the number of unicorns (Fortune) as an indicator, they are made more frequently in San Francisco. Of the 174 listed worldwide, 55 (or nearly one third) are located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

If we analyze the funds raised by the European technological startups in 2017 (a record year), it reached 25 billion euros in Europe (including Israel, Russia and Turkey), while only 100 technology companies based in the Bay Area have reach 13 billion euros.

That is to say, as innovation tends to diversify geographically in this day and age, it is unthinkable to ignore the Silicon Valley if we intend to have a global impact within the digital space.

Wallonia / Belgium USA

Written by

Wallonia / Belgian Trade Commission builds bridges and breaks walls between Wallonia and the US. www.wallonia.us

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