Silicon Cape was a great idea, back in 1990…

The best tips I’ve ever read about start-ups (and sadly I forget the source) was “Build a business, not an office”.

The internet made the world smaller. Companies now find efficiency in fewer employees, smaller offices, and not making everyone waste 10 hours of productivity per week in rush hour traffic. What matters most is the work you do, not where you do it.

Silicon Cape has always been a nonsensical concept to me. The motivation was admirable, but the execution was doomed and ultimately lead it down the garden path to an entrepreneurial circle jerk of people wanting free development services — their online message board quickly degenerating into hundreds of posts like “Build my software and do all the hard work and I’ll give you 1% equity in my terrible idea”. It also implies a geographic restriction on innovation, despite all claims to the contrary, and despite the world having moved on from that a decade ago. Trying to emulate Silicon Valley to achieve the results which formed it by choosing an area and encouraging a bunch of start-ups (few of which have achieved any real world success, at least the way I define success) has always seemed to me a bit like renting a Ferrari so that you’ll become wealthy just because people think you already are.

Are you trying to sell a city, or are you trying to sell technology? Where exactly is the technology?

Silicon Valley grew out of circumstance, a number of successful companies which happened to be there during the beginning of the tech industry. It made sense for others to gather near these companies in an age where face-to-face board meetings were the norm for every engagement, and a key feeder of this was Stanford University. Companies could be close to their customers, competition, the latest research, and find skilled employees easily.

There might be some good Universities in Cape Town, but as far as their funding and research goes in the computer science arena it’s definitely not on a level like Stanford which is happily offering a great deal of their knowledge to the world free of charge. None of our Universities come close, instead they’re universally closed door operations of academic elitism, with a dash of political meddling and confirmation bias that actively prevents any real innovation. I’ve never even seen any good Open Source projects or interesting papers come out of them, never mind game changing R&D.

Compared to the rest of the word the crusty old knowledge we call a BSc in this country, and what they consider a passing grade, is a total embarrassment on an international level. These factors oppose us having a Silicon anywhere, never mind a Silicon Cape.

Argumentum ad populum

And that is inherently the problem, something some friends and I call “small town syndrome” which is just slightly a different take on the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Creating hubs and local groups is useful for sharing knowledge, but shutting the door to the outside world (even through something as simple as the name of your group) means you’re sharing the same incorrect knowledge which is a decade out of date.

A great example which speaks to the extent of this self delusion is that the vast majority of developers, managers, and entrepreneurs in SA still think PHP and .NET are good technologies, simply because they don’t know any better and don’t communicate with the global community. And they defend these thoroughly debunked ideologies viciously to defend their sense of self and the ego they’ve build their careers on rather than a love of technology. We still teach Pascal in grade school, and C++ and Java in University, while our competition learns Python in grade school and how to build the next language in University.

The sad part is no one has the patience to try and educate people who’ve surrounded themselves with a pile of equally delusional individuals to validate their false views instead of approaching technology the way it should be — with humility, and as a passion which demands a life time of learning and reevaluating ones perception.

“The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility” — Edsger W. Dijkstra

The world has moved on from the notion that your success is dependent on a geographic position. We don’t need physical hub spaces to learn from people, the internet replaced that. MOOCs are replacing clumsy bureaucratic education structures. People form online communities feeding from knowledge around the entire planet, and giving back to it — which as the problems and challenges we face as a society become increasingly more difficult, requires the input of society as a whole, not a select few based on where they went to school, how much money they have, where they live, or how much they agree with you.

What we really need though is for the government to stop interfering, and some tertiary education which is actually educational and accessible.