Who would believe the area of Santa Clara, the self-proclaimed capital city of Silicon Valley, used to be famous for its prunes before the 1940s? In 1939: 2 young engineers, Bill Hewlett & David Packard, started to develop an oscillator in a garage. Silicon Valley was born.

While wondering about the reasons for this phenomenon in the Paris metro a couple days ago, I wrote on my metro ticket the 10 most relevant-in-my-opinion variables explaining the success of Silicon Valley. I could hardly read what I had put down, but it should more or less boil down to this list:

1. Creative entrepreneurs with a can-do mentality (from dream to execution)
2. Top-notch Universities (Stanford, Berkeley, etc.) & R&D labs (Bell labs & Xerox Park)
3. Venture capitalists back seed and early-stage projects
4. Geeky mindset: appetite for innovation and technology
5. Attracts top technical talents from all over the world
6. « Nothing is impossible » state of mind
7. Failure isn’t perceived as evil: you learn from your mistakes
8. Skills and drive matter more than age, status, degrees, name, bank account well..we’re in the US so maybe, etc.)
9. Official support from relevant authorities (State, tax administration, regulators, politicians, etc.)
10. Climate! (I truly believe software developers are very climate-sensitive)

On a number of points (3., 4., 5., 6., 7., 8., 9., 10.), France still has a long way to go, although a lot has been going on in the Paris Innovation Valley recently – especially in the software (VideoLan, Neolane, Excentive, Total Immersion, Voluntis, SoftFluent, Seemage, L4 Logistics, etc.) and Internet (Netvibes, Wikio, U-[Lik], DailyMotion, Viadeo, etc.) industries.

On top of this, I also found a short and yet pretty interesting video featuring venture capitalists and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley (namely: Jonathan Medved (Israel Seed Partners, Vringo), Joe Schoendorf (Accel Partners), Mary Alexander (Quova), Daniel Gatti (Big Bangwidth), Kim Odhner (Orient Networks) )(more. Here’s what I took away from it:

• the comparison with Japan (great Universities, top research capabilities, money available; so why aren’t start ups booming there?);
• the difference between the ‘would do’ European mentality and the ‘can do’ American attitude raised by the Dutch woman raised in Atlanta;
• the tax burden dampering Germany’s start up potential;
• the point made about people who keep repeating ‘it’s not possible’. Are you one of these?

While you think about it, watch the video:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=2WRugBmnvYQ]

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