Silicon Valley Backs the Local Unknown Over the Distant Giant

This article is a reprint of a previous post.

Whether this is a culture unique to Silicon Valley, or whether I just happen to keep running into the same kind of cases, I can’t be sure.

“Better the local nobody than some big company far away.”

That’s roughly the policy I sense at work here.

This is mainly about partner selection.

A wide variety of infrastructure startups have found success coming out of Silicon Valley, and their first customers are almost always Silicon Valley companies themselves.

For infrastructure businesses, the game comes down to whether you can secure a certain number of customers at an early stage.

In that sense, Silicon Valley is an extremely easy place to try that kind of business.

Let’s start by looking at the current state of things in Japan.

There’s no denying that in Japan, “starting a company” and “venture” still carry a negative image.

That sentiment has built up over a long history involving legislative background and the many ways media has mocked, exaggerated, and picked apart the various movements of people who actually “started companies” and “went the venture route” — some of the coverage groundless, some of it entirely true, with onlookers alternately cheering and hurling abuse.

Naturally, something like “common sense” doesn’t shift overnight.

Pointing to any single cause only makes the problem harder to understand.

Better to think of it as “Japan” as a whole collectively pushing these negative sentiments forward.

So why is that the case?

The root cause that comes to mind most readily is “lean on the big tree.”

You could also call it a culture rooted in farming communities that dislikes upheaval.

This is easy enough to understand that it probably doesn’t need much elaboration.

When unsure what to buy, go with a brand name; when unsure where to drink, go with a chain restaurant; when job-hunting, go with a big company — that kind of thinking.

In a sense this is thoroughly rational. When you’re unsure or in trouble, leaning on the big tree obviously maximizes your output.

But here I want to bring in a slightly different pair of keywords.

“Cheering” and “overestimation.”

Americans tend to get worked up easily, whereas Japanese people, I think, tend as a rule to be calmer and always keep one step back.

That’s why in Japan, sports too have long been comfortable with a rather laid-back cheering style like baseball’s “sing the cheer song while drinking beer.”

“I won’t stake my life on cheering.”

“If I accidentally get too worked up, that’s a little embarrassing.”

As a reaction, this is entirely understandable for a Japanese person.

Now, the other keyword.

Japanese people dislike overestimation — of themselves and of others alike.

Part of this comes from being a nation that has internalized Confucian modesty, but it’s also an expression of a conservative stance: how embarrassing it would be to turn out wrong.

In America, by contrast, people casually say things like “He is a kind of genius.”

If someone in Japan said “Oh, he’s a genius,” you could be sure it was either flattery or had some ulterior motive.

America has all sorts of other overestimations too — the “he-can-do-anything theory” (he’s all-around capable) and the “mystery professional theory” (he knows a little, so he must be a professional). People even say this about themselves.

I think this comes from a culture that gets swept up in “cheering.”

Americans aren’t afraid of the team they’re cheering for losing miserably and pathetically, and they aren’t afraid of the person they overestimated turning in a lame result.

It’s an utterly refreshing culture.

“Better to act and regret than not act and regret” is something people often say about their own choices, but the broad-mindedness to apply that even to cheering for others seems to be something Japanese people lack.

It’s fine to be wrong — trying hard is a wonderful thing in itself, and that alone makes you want to cheer someone on.

Americans are an irrational people who apply this somewhat simplistic, emotion-drenched spirit to work as well.

They’d rather cheer on someone right in front of them, someone they’ve known for a while and who is working hard, than some vaguely-known person at a big company they have no personal connection to.

If you share the risk, you can share the return too.

No matter how much you cooperate, sometimes you still lose, but the damage after failure can be made smaller.

A person who fell into a pitfall isn’t a loser — they’re the one who gets credit for finding where the pitfall is.

Part of it is worldwide, part of it is village society. That, in a sense, is the temperament of Silicon Valley.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2013/10/403/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.