Silicon Valley: A special mindset

The success factors of Silicon Valley are the focus of our blog series. Today we are looking for the elements that make up the special mindset of America's West Coast.

Silicon Valley blog series

• Part 1: If you don't ask, you will never know
• Part 2: Chasing the unicorn
• Part 3: “Be a sponge and not a babbler:” Interview with Annika Hoeltje (1)
• Part 4: “Be a sponge and not a babbler:” Interview with Annika Hoeltje (2)
• Part 5: A special mindset
• Part 6: Properly set up for success
• Part 7: Lunch and Learn - Bites of knowledge
• Part 8: “The gold diggers from back then are the founders of today” – Interview with Oliver Donner and Loren Heilig (1)
• Part 9: “The gold diggers from back then are the founders of today” – Interview with Oliver Donner and Loren Heilig (2)

One thing you'll find hard to find among the start-ups and investors in the San Francisco Bay Area: a pronounced tendency to self-presentation. Silicon Valley is not a place for status symbols. In front of the buildings, there are no flags promoting the companies located there. Visitors are not received in grand lobbies or led into sumptuous executive suites. You pull back and focus exclusively on the customer.

Space is rare

The rooms are functional, the space in the offices often cramped. It may well happen that five employees have to share 100 square feet, which has as much to do with missing workplace standards. Work is organized on a project-basis. Conventional departmental structures are often absent. What matters is always the next development cycle.

Bundling expertise

Investors prefer to invest their money in new start-ups rather than in their own status. Many company founders also act as lenders and use their investment to find new talent for their own company. San Francisco is teeming with co-working spaces, incubators, and accelerators.

These places are reservoirs of different skills. Many investors put similar start-ups together in an incubator. There the teams research and develop together. This creates the basis for new business ideas. The results then flow into other companies, not unlike what happens with pharmaceuticals research.

Unlike in Europe, not every company in Silicon Valley has to become a success and establish itself permanently. Instead, talented people simply come together to form a new project that is another attempt to change the world.