Decoding the myths and mysteries of Silicon Valley into real-life lessons
Author and serial entrepreneur Michelle E. Messina on tapping into the magic of Silicon Valley
Previous success doesn’t guarantee future success. Only hundreds of startups will raise Series A funding each quarter. And in Silicon Valley, getting good advice and mentoring isn’t as simple as being willing to pay it forward.
These are just some of the realities that Michelle E. Messina and Jonathan C. Baer convey in their recently published book Decoding Silicon Valley: The Insider’s Guide, which seeks to dispel the myth that everything in Silicon Valley is unicorns and rainbows with big pots of gold. Their goal is to help entrepreneurs learn from the real magic of Silicon Valley — that is, the tried and tested best practices for building global businesses developed over 50+ years.
Michelle Messina, serial entrepreneur and CEO of the global consulting and training firm Explora International, is the current Author-in-Residence at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center. She sat down with the Center to talk more about her book, and why decoding the myths of Silicon Valley is essential to fostering business success.
What drove you to write this book?
The challenge I’ve seen for the last 12 years is that international entrepreneurs often lack an understanding of the best practices for building a business. Many founders are engineers and scientists with highly technical backgrounds, but have trouble understanding target markets, communicating value propositions, and then networking and selling. Those business development skills are really hard for many people.
The fact that we’ve built a machine here in Silicon Valley that’s good at growing and scaling companies is something we’re trying to break down in a way that makes sense to entrepreneurs. We wanted to capture the practices and systematize them in a way that’s effective and efficient.
At the same time, we want to dispel misconceptions and myths about Silicon Valley that can be harmful — particularly around how easy it is to raise capital, build networks, and find customers here.
Through your company, you’ve found that entrepreneurs the world over are trying to understand “The Silicon Valley Mindset.” Could you explain this mindset?
The mindset is around building global companies but also about building capital and wealth. These are companies that grow big and fast. Of course, there are a lot of different factors that go into this.
This mindset means focusing on all right things that need to align to grow a company. It means communicating a 360-degree view of your company: Your team, go-to-market strategy, product status, how much money the company has, etc.
Finally, operating with intensity and speed is essential because the competition is breathing down your neck.
Basically, we have a really unique startup ecosystem here where we all talk the same language and have the same beliefs around how to grow companies — and grow them fast.
What are some of the most prevalent myths and misconceptions about Silicon Valley, and why is it so important to debunk them?
One of the most misunderstood aspects of Silicon Valley is this that everything is supposedly free here on a pay-it-forward basis. So international entrepreneurs come here expecting to easily find free guidance, services, expertise and mentorship. But in reality, it’s more about quid pro quo in Silicon Valley — if I make an intro to someone for you, you’ll be able to reciprocate down the line.
The second myth is that because you were successful in your home market, you’ll also be successful here. The key to success for international companies is very complex. If you don’t already have customers and traction in the U.S., you can’t automatically mirror your success from back home. There’s lots of market validation required clarify the business opportunity.
Third is the myth of constant success. People are always talking about unicorns and success stories, which plays into a false perception of how easy it is to raise capital here. The number of companies successfully raising series A funding is merely hundreds each quarter — out of thousands, or tens of thousands, of companies. When international entrepreneurs come here, they’re often confounded by how inaccurate their perceptions were.
Lastly, Silicon Valley doesn’t have a lock on smart entrepreneurs or innovative technology. I’ve been to so many countries where I’ve seen entrepreneurs doing amazing things. Entrepreneurs are everywhere.
Even though you’re a veteran entrepreneur, what did you learn from writing this book?
It reinforced how difficult it is to build a company. The problem with Silicon Valley is that we really only talk about success. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about failure, which really skews the whole dialogue. Everyone thinks it’s easy to come here and be a success. But I’ve learned that having insufficient dialog or analyses about why things fail is actually dangerous. The media is guilty of it — we’re all guilty of it.
Michelle E. Messina, co-author of Decoding Silicon Valley: The Insider’s Guide and CEO of Explora International LLC, is a serial entrepreneur who brings strong sales, marketing, and business development skills to startups everywhere. She pioneered the Silicon Valley best practices training of startups in 2004 and has worked in more than 35 countries.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellemessina
Michelle is also currently Author-in-Residence at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center, a program that brings leading writers, creatives, and scholars to the Center for three-month stints to showcase their work, conduct joint research, and help entrepreneurs solve interdisciplinary problems.
