Why Silicon Valley is Unlike Any Place in the World
I wake up in San Francisco every morning surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world, feeling like I am living in the future. But even after spending 6+ years in the San Francisco Bay area, there’s always an occasion to pause for a second and be mesmerized at what just happened. Last Friday was just another example of why there’s no place in the world like San Francisco / Silicon Valley.
In early 2015, my Co-founder and I worked out of a warehouse-style office in San Francisco with a couple other startups. The office was located in a not so gentrified part of SOMA, surrounded by a police station and a row of bail bonds providers. But somehow Soma has become the new center of the tech universe, with companies like Airbnb and Shyp located across the street from the office.
Directly across the street from us was a small 2-car garage that I walked by every single day for lunch. At first, I thought it was a car mechanic shop with a couple of guys running their own repair business from the garage. But after a week or two it occurred to me that they were working on the exact same black Audi every single day. I then assumed they must have been a group of passionate Audi enthusiasts. It was only a month or two later that it was brought to my attention that the “Audi enthusiasts” across the street were actually a small startup called Cruise Automation. GM announced on Friday that it was acquiring Cruise Automation for over $1 billion.
Just think about that for a second. A 28-year engineer wakes up one morning and says to himself “I’m going to build a self driving car.” And not only that, he enters a garage and surfaces three months later with a prototype for a self driving kit that works with an existing car that he built entirely himself. And 2 1/2 years later he sells his technology to one of the largest auto makers in the world. In my experience, that just doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world.
Now granted Kyle Vogt is a rare and exceptional talent, but it’s not just the technical talent that makes this a truly remarkable feat. It’s his combination of technical talent, business acumen, and above all else the conviction to go out and do something that most would have written off as simply impossible for a single person to achieve.
“At Cruise, he was the only one for three months to build it from nothing to a prototype, both the hardware and software. That is a rare level of talent,” said Sam Altman, head of the Y Combinator startup incubator. “I can see Kyle being the next CEO of GM.”
It’s hard to not pause what you are doing (for at least a moment) and tip your hat to true technologists like Kyle Vogt and his team, who make Silicon Valley a place unlike any other.
You can follow me on Twitter @sidviswanathan or reach me via email at sid.viswanathan@gmail.com
