Into the Valley

I seem to have made something of a habit of visiting Silicon Valley at the same time as its wealthiest resident makes a splash. Four years ago this week I was in Santa Clara with a group of French journalists on the day Apple staged its "Wish we could say more" 'special event' a couple of miles down the road in Cupertino. It was during this that Apple launched the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple Pay and the Apple Watch, as well as gifting 500 million iTunes subscribers an unsolicited copy of U2’s brand new album, Songs Of Innocence, which no one, it turned out, really wanted at all.

So to be sitting in an office, last Wednesday, just 15 minutes' drive from Apple's latest launch had a feeling of déjà vu about it. But, then, so often these Apple events do. Even without paying direct attention to the event, occasionally glancing at the video stream on Twitter, I could see it was exactly the usual format: big black screens, Tim Cook opening with the latest numbers of how many gazillion iOS products have been sold, a slick film with design chief Sir Jony Ive intoning his philosophy on the look, shape and feel of things, followed by marketing chief Phil Schiller’s sales pitch.

Picture: Apple

As impressive - and as eye-wateringly expensive - as the new iPhone XS and XS Max are, they are - along with the fourth generation Apple Watch also announced - merely incremental. A new 'Bionic' chip, better OLED displays and a few more wizzy gizmos under the skin might be enough to send frenzied fanboys out to queue in front of their local Apple stores with a deckchair and a flask of tea, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s just this year's new model. If, like me, you’re considering replacing an older model, then, also like me, money will be burning a hole in your pocket. But it’s nothing essential, no matter how Apple pitches it. Wall Street takes a similar view. The new iPhones will, no doubt, trouser Apple another huge pile of cash to add to their existing $260 billion stash, but gone are the days when the company can announce something irresistibly must-have, and see its stock price rocket. In fact, Apple shares have a habit of dropping if financial analysts give a "meh" reaction to another slew of nice but relatively uninteresting new toys.

Now I think about it, gone are the days when Silicon Valley produced anything that made the world sit up and take notice. Google Glass, anyone? No, me neither. When I first professionally entered the technology world in 1995 it was still possible to create something totally new. These were the heady days of the dot com boom, where ideas born in bedrooms and garages could attract the largesse of venture capitalists and, consequently, the attention of Porsche salesmen. Silicon Valley had, when I made my first business visit in the late 90s, taken over from Hollywood, 400 miles further south, as the world's dream factory. Just as I’d marvelled at the sight of studios like Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Paramount when I first visited Southern California, I was equally as slack-jawed several years later driving through San Francisco Bay Area cities like Mountain View and Sunnyvale and seeing the logos of Intel, HP and the-then Internet giant Yahoo! emblazoned on corporate real estate.

Then, tech hardware was the thing. Today the Valley is a sea of code as software, data and algorithms churn through its myriad campuses. Whereas once we bought TVs, HiFis, PCs and cameras separately, today all that functionality. can be crammed into a single iPhone, with its monster screen and (as promoted this week as a virtue), high quality speakers with extra wide output (the sort of thing passengers on the London Underground are just going to love...). Those who glue it all together, store it in the cloud and making the networks that deliver all this data and content more efficiently are the burghers of today’s Silicon Valley. Don’t get me wrong, the behemoths are still there - you can’t miss the household brand names who all, to a company, have an R&D presence in the Bay Area (no cheap affair, either, given that the Valley is one of the most expensive places on the planet in which to employ people). But the novelty that exploded in the 90s has worn off. The Dream Factory has given way to a corporate beige.

In the 26 years since I first set foot in Santa Clara County it has cycled through different phases. Dot com excitement and digital tech gave way to health start-ups, who in turn gave way to the green revolution. The dot coms still exist, of course, nestling in and amongst all the other consumer electronics, health tech, IT and telecoms businesses in the Valley. And there is still some sense of innovation. But not a lot of 'new'. Uber and Tesla might be toddlers by comparison to Google or PayPal, and Facebook famously has evolved so far that it is part of two-sevenths of the world's population. Rather than being the startup it once was, with Mark Zuckerburg and a team of coders hunched over their laptops, Facebook is now part of the establishment, as much Valley founding fathers as Intel and HP. Just three years ago Facebook moved into its 430,000-square-foot, Frank Gehry-designed headquarters in Menlo Park. Now it is planning an even bigger "mixed-use village" on the same site that will include a supermarket, 1,500 apartments, a 125,000 square feet retail space and 1.75 million square feet of office space. Google can claim a similar expansion with its vast corporate town in Mountain View (when I lived in the Valley between 2001 and 2003 I’d not even heard of Google - Yahoo! was, to all intents and purposes, "The Internet".

Picture: Google

What hasn’t changed over the last couple of decades is the wealth. Some Valley veterans claim that it's less ostentatious now than it was in the boom years, while others maintain that it is actually more obvious. It's hard to tell, really. Cars, a touchstone of disposable wealth, appear to a little more German in the Bay Area than other places in America, probably to the annoyance of the current keeper of the White House (who is descended from German imports, anyway). And property...well let’s just say that property in the region is even more ludicrously expensive than when I rented a two-bedroom 'condo' for $2400 a month, part of which was subsidised by my employer.

The can-do culture, however, is still there. The sight of basketball hoops nailed to notice boards and dudes in surf shorts skateboarding along corridors may be a tad worn these days, but the culture prevails, even in those giants who've long-since seen the days of being pioneers on the frontier of technology. Campuses across the South Bay are casual environments, where employees are worked hard but are also allowed some fun in laid-back offices. California's weather provides some of that relief, with many corporate HQs providing outdoor spaces for lunchtime barbecues and team picnics. Many companies, too, have followed Google's cultural lead by offering employees free food and snacks throughout the day, an investment that keeps them engaged - and enclosed - at the same time.

When I first arrived in the Valley I was given a lot of sage advice from more established ex-pats. First, I would soon grow bored of the permanent sunshine (I didn't). The second, was never to wear a suit, lest I be viewed with suspicion and, subsequently, likely to close down a business in times of trouble. I completely forgot this maxim this week when I entered the offices of my new employer wearing the jacket-and-chinos combo uniform in London. Instantly I was marked out by people's gazes as an outsider, given that even senior executives here wear T-shirts and jeans. It's an environment I'm very at home amongst - I've never been much of a suit wearer.

Picture: Google

Workplace attire not withstanding, these last few days have brought me to a conclusion. Well, perhaps more of a realisation. Something I hadn't fully appreciated when I lived in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. It's what makes the Valley tick. In the 15 years since I returned to Europe, I've been immersed in a European corporate culture, working for Dutch, French-American and then Finnish companies. Such companies are often national incumbents, more like civil service organisations than enterprises, nurturing careers from cradle-to-grave. Employees are well rewarded with pensions and holiday allowances, statutory sick leave and other social provisions. And thus they work their way steadily towards retirement, when they cash in their pensions or go off to play a lot of golf. Valley companies, however, run on different view. Even those that have been in business many years still feel like they're on some imaginary frontier, where it is impossible to sit still - dangerous, even - less they leave themselves vulnerable. Life is fast, work is hard, but the work-hard, play-hard spirit is tangible. Even in one of the most expensive regions on the planet to buy or even rent property, people seem engaged and self-purposed. It's an age-old cliche, I know, but here the attitude is 'can do', not 'let's give it some thought'. And I like it.