To Silicon Valley and Back: Part 4

Here it is, the last part of my series about my stay in the mecca of inspiration and technology. Three months flew by and I’m back home. The last few weeks were quite intense once more, because it was time for the visits to the big tech companies that I had planned months in advance. Time for a review. So what are the people and companies in Silicon Valley actually doing differently from us?

In a nutshell, in three words: talent, technology and capital. These three things in a high concentration and a mutually reinforcing relationship. But it’s also a different mentality, namely that of testing, failing, learning, trying again. On top of that, people simply think bigger about ideas from the very start. Entirely in the spirit of disruption.

But so far, nothing new, nothing you haven’t read elsewhere already. So what else? I’ll tell you: creativity and collaboration. Companies rely much more on environments, offerings and structures that encourage creativity and collaboration. The fun factor in the office also carries more weight (fun & playful). Walk through your own office and observe everyday life closely: do you feel inherently encouraged to be creative and to collaborate? Can you feel that people are having fun here? Can you feel that people are more friends than just coworkers? I get to know a lot of companies and can tell you that most of them don’t work like this. It’s much more about titles, departments and clear processes. It’s not that the people in the Valley are better or more capable, not at all. There’s nothing unattainable or mystical about Silicon Valley either. The way people work together and create great things is different and is deliberately encouraged.
Too often, people also misunderstand that a fancy office with a foosball table and talk about flat hierarchies is enough. Wrong. If the entire company culture isn’t geared toward it, even the nicest office won’t help you.

To develop exactly this company culture and to inspire and motivate employees, people are also closer to the founders and/or company owners than at home. On the walls, you sometimes find framed notes from the founders meant to inspire. I myself got to know and take part in many more social events. Back home, I tend to hear sentences like "not work stuff in my free time too". But it’s not primarily about work at all, it’s about getting to know each other better. And yes, of course, ideally something new comes out of it. All of this forms the foundation of a collaborative and creative work culture. Companies are willing to spend quite a lot on it, because everything at these events is free and they take place during regular working hours. But it’s seen as a worthwhile investment in the future.

In the last few weeks, a few more highlights were on the agenda. A quick note up front: it took me a good three months to plan most of them in advance. So it’s a good idea to plan your stay well ahead of time. Short-notice and spontaneous visits, especially to companies, are rather difficult. But let’s start with the big tech companies.

Among other things, I had the opportunity to drop by big companies such as Airbnb, Microsoft, Cisco, Google and Apple and spend a day with each of them. Every visit had something special, because each had a different focus:

• Google = collaboration
• Microsoft = technology
• Cisco = innovation
• Apple = user experience
• Airbnb = creativity

Writing up every visit in detail here would unfortunately go beyond the scope, but in the list above I’ve linked my somewhat more detailed reports on LinkedIn. At this point, I just want to briefly mention once more that these companies offer far more than just fancy offices or free lunch! Those are just “small” services that, taken together, all help foster a very special company culture. The pictures can quickly give the wrong impression there.

A bit more rustic, but no less inspiring and impressive for it, was my visit to a small robotics startup called Rapid Robotics. In its latest funding round, the team had just raised $37M. Founder and CEO Jordan Kretchmer took the time to introduce me to his company and his product. I have to say at this point that I have never heard such a good company pitch! Truly fascinating and fully in line with the motto "Pitch the problem, not the solution." If I had been a VC (venture capitalist), I would have invested on the spot. 😁 Actually, I also made mistakes, because he doesn’t see his company as a hardware robotics company, but as a software company. Why is this detail so important? Software scales much better than hardware. I was allowed to film and take photos, because the IP (intellectual property) isn’t in the robotic arm but in the AI for visual image recognition. The way he explained this and the financial relationships to me fascinated me and will certainly influence me in the future.

I can also highly recommend the WeWork space in San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower. Here you can easily book day passes and very easily meet other founders. I found it incredibly inspiring to talk with others about go-to-market strategies, user engagement tests and app logic. All of this is topped off with a magnificent view, great workspaces and good coffee.☕️

I also got to know the rocket startup Firefly, or rather: I had the opportunity to be at their launch event for their second rocket launch (the first rocket exploded). By a lucky coincidence, I had the chance to witness the second launch at Vandenberg Space Base, including a speech by the CEO and the nerve-racking launch preparations.
By the way, a little tip: If you ever want to watch a rocket launch yourself, you’ll find an online map with the best spots here.

I also count among my highlights the visits to our own company sites in Hillsboro (Oregon) and Vacaville (California). In Hillsboro, I not only saw how we manufacture pharmaceutical products from filling to delivery, but also got to know the new center for individualized therapies. Put very roughly, as a layperson and not as a researcher or doctor: How can you develop an individual drug from just one blood donation that cures me after taking it once? Really exciting and enormously important for the future.
In Hillsboro, I then got to see with my own eyes once more how we produce and what the individual process steps look like. By the way, it’s one of the largest pharmaceutical production sites in the world (measured by production volume). Even though I’m not a process engineer, it’s highly exciting and insightful to see it with your own eyes.

One personal highlight, among others, was the visit to the Chase Center – the basketball arena in San Francisco where the Golden State Warriors played the Portland Trail Blazers. The atmosphere, the setting and everything around it were simply gigantic. You don’t have to be a basketball fan to get carried away at a sports event like this. In the end, we even made it onto the dance cam (unfortunately, I can’t find a recording of it online). 😉

Things got really patriotic during Fleet Week. For a few days, US Navy ships are docked in the harbor and there are air shows, including the Blue Angels. Holding big events together with the armed forces would be absolutely unthinkable back home in Germany, so it was an experience worth having. I couldn’t help smiling as we watched the jets during their air shows while Danger Zone (from the movie Top Gun) thundered from the loudspeakers on the ground.

I’ve added all the places I stopped at to a Google map. On it, you’ll find not only recommendations for classic tourist hotspots, but also for good restaurants (recommendations from colleagues) and for local companies.

View the map on Google Maps

Since I’ve been asked more and more often how I organized the various visits, here are my tips:

• I bought a premium LinkedIn account especially for this. Then I searched for people at the relevant companies whose job titles were relevant to me. I sent them a friendly message and asked for an exchange. I have to say, though, that with the big companies it worked through referrals. As I said, the whole thing took a good three months of planning. Security restrictions are very strict and since COVID, hardly anyone offers separate tours anymore.
• At Airbnb, you can book a tour online. It even supports a good cause, because the proceeds are donated.

I was able to learn and take away an enormous amount. Not only work-wise, but also personally and culturally. I no longer feel that Silicon Valley is something mystical and unattainable – quite the opposite. I even firmly believe that we here at home (in Germany and Switzerland) could actually do it better! We have talent, we have money and we know how to do technology. On top of that, our social framework is right: we have social insurance as standard, which catches people when they fall. We have good data protection rules that protect the individual. All of this combined adds up to clear competitive advantages that Silicon Valley cannot offer in this way and won’t be able to offer in the foreseeable future.

What we need to move away from more is understanding work as an activity purely for earning a wage. We need to put much more emphasis on creating creative cultures in our teams. Someone told me that we Germans are good at standardizing processes and making them efficient, but we’re not good at accepting risks and the unforeseeable. Our ambitions are also too small and we don’t take creative ideas into account enough. Work there is a bit more “playful” than here. It’s hard to put into just a few sentences, but creativity and fun go hand in hand and are ultimately the foundation of an innovative, diverse and open company culture.
He’s right, but that’s something you can work on.
For my part, I’ll try to bring more of this attitude into my teams, and I’m incredibly grateful for this unique life experience.

If you want to learn more or have questions, just write to me. I’m currently preparing a series of talks to share these experiences in even more and better detail. I’ll also be feeding the experiences into my book project.

• To Part 1 of “To Silicon Valley and Back”
• To Part 2 of “To Silicon Valley and Back”
• To Part 3 of “To Silicon Valley and Back”