Great podcast with Eric Schmidt. I am not in love with him as a person or even some of the heroes he worships. With that, I am not endorsing the people or the characters but merely grabbing what I think is some important concepts in building an ecosystem.
Have a listen.
I am trying something new to help me generate more content – which is to make voice memos and transcript them to edit for blog posts.
This is what I was thinking while listening.
When Eric Schmidt talks about another Silicon Valley, I think it is very relevant where he discusses that the key pillars are capital and time and the culture. The culture is super important and often overlooked. When I consider Singapore, I think it actually has a lot of these things – capital keeps coming and the time is getting about right.
In my opinion, Singapore is on its way to becoming a great ecosystem, but it will take more time. The age of the ecosystem is less than 10 years – maybe even younger but some accounts.
Culture is a tough though. Singapore is not like California, even Eric talks about it, how the California culture is quite an important framework for the success of Silicon Valley. If you think about Singapore then the culture or other soft attributes that surround the ecosystem are going to be lacking. For me, a big thing missing is openness and inherently, if you think of startups and VC – it is not very open by its very nature. It’s actually kind of secretive.
One of the reasons I enjoy blogging and talking is just to try to enhance my own spirit of openness. It’s not from a perspective of being right or from having an opinion. It’s from just the expectation that if I open up and share, then potentially, we can all learn from it.
I find it interesting when Eric talks about the early days and how the companies used to help each other a lot. Google and Yahoo used to share deals because they figured if Google sold something, then Yahoo would have a chance to sell something to the same company. Yahoo would do the same thing and share the information with Google. That’s a pretty interesting dynamic between companies that you probably never thought was actually happening. Imagine if little bits like this, sharing or a paying it forward culture begin to permeate in the Singapore or South East Asian region.
The local ecosystem or startup scene would rise to a level that you don’t see today. Everybody would benefit and if everyone benefits then the ecosystem is going to improve.
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