Except
that in every other way, Van doesn’t fit the American startup mold.
She’s the only member of her company based in the US. She geared up to
build her app, an AI assistant for English learners to improve their
accents, by returning to Vietnam and immersing herself in the needs of
her initial target users. Almost two years later, her seven employees
are split between Vietnam and Portugal.
Van
doesn’t hesitate to call San Francisco home, but she also stays for a
business reason, which is that the networking is second to none.
“Vietnam is all about first-generation startups,” Van explains.
“Everyone is still figuring out what they’re doing, and no one’s in a
good place to mentor.” So she’s planted herself in the one place on
Earth where you can’t do your dry cleaning without running into a
potential advisor, expert, investor, or future hire. For her company,
that edge makes the time zone patchwork worth the sacrifice of sleep and
sanity.
So
when Van first heard about Google’s new Launchpad Accelerator, she was
skeptical. The company was in effect promising mature startups from
emerging markets the most epic networking service on the planet: For
every hiccup Elsa was facing, Google would match her and two colleagues
with a top expert — sometimes the
top expert — in that area. For free, with no catch, no quid pro quo.
Van decided to give it a shot. Despite her Bay Area bonafides, launching
a product in Vietnam had still been a slog.
Elsa
is one of the rising stars of The Rest of the World—and Google has a
plan to get in the door of companies like Van’s and shape them in its
image. It wants to educate them on the best practices of product
development and speed up their learning curves. Think
of it as strategic philanthropy: In exchange for helping these
companies grow, Google gets to scrutinize their books, observe how its
own products are being used (or not) in less familiar markets, and
spread its gospel to the far reaches of the globe. Eventually, these
companies will play an enormous role in getting millions more people to
conduct their lives online, and Google will be there as well, ready to
scoop up new users.
“The
one thing emerging markets are missing is success stories,” says Roy
Glasberg, Launchpad’s global manager. “You need an ecosystem.” A wiry
Israeli sporting close-cropped hair and performance-wear chic, Glasberg
is articulating an ideology percolating inside Google about why so few
big companies emerge from outside Silicon Valley. He and his colleagues
say the word “ecosystem” a lot. It’s a subtle, unstated way of
contrasting the rich environment of the Bay Area, where investors, board
members, competitors, and talented workers swirl in a self-pollinating
bubble, with the relative deserts of countries such as Indonesia,
Mexico, or even bigger players like Brazil. In the ecosystem view, the
Bay Area is the goldilocks planet, and the rest of the world has the
inhospitable climate of Mars or Mercury.
Google’s
theory is that until some company — any company! — has produced a
massive IPO or engineered itself an eye-popping acquisition, a
developing region won’t amass the resources it needs to support
entrepreneurship. Venture capitalists are uneasy, or simply absent. The
talent pool is shallow, with few local technologists who have first-hand
experience transforming small companies into large ones. When you
wonder where to find a good data scientist, or how to negotiate better
terms in your series A, or what to fix in your app to get a better
conversion rate, no one around you has the answers.
So
a delta force within Google, led by Glasberg, set out to see if it
could do what countless governments, regional technology parks, and
grant programs have failed to do before it: fire up startup kilns around
the world that then take on a life of their own. They would do so by
picking the sharpest, most proven startups, and showering them with
unconditional support for six months (and $50,000, but who’s counting)—
essentially treating them as integrated wings of Google for the
duration.
To
earn that kind of access, these startups have to be much more than a
Gucci knockoff. They’re not just the Postmates of the Philippines, or
the Tesla of Thailand. They are fiercely unique, tackling unsolved
problems and producing code that rivals anything emerging from San
Francisco or the South Bay. These are the brightest minds of elsewhere.
And Google’s now giving them a jolt of adrenaline straight from the
planet’s entrepreneurial mothership: itself.
*****
Transporting the magic of Silicon Valley
to other cities is a trope so old, and so beloved by government
bureaucrats, that these days it hardly quickens the pulse. Silicon
Alley. Silicon Glen. Silicon Wadi. Silicon Fen....
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