Why Calgary (or your home town) will not be the next Silicon Valley.

In the Eighties I had an inflection point in my career—clear only in retrospect—where I had a choice. I could have set out for Silicon Valley not all that long after it started to be called that. I had family in the area who I like to believe would have put me up for a while until I got on my feet. No matter how long the arduous process of getting a green card would have been, it would have been years behind me by now and with that, who knows how things would have turned out.

Instead, I drifted into a new job that sent me to Calgary, Alberta, Canada without a great deal of thought and absolutely no planning. It was a classic example of ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ but I doubt I thought about it enough to even think that. In fact, I likely assumed after my one year contract was up, I would wind up back in Vancouver after which I would figure out what to do next. That was 28 years—over half of my life—ago.

But it has turned out well. Calgary has been very good to me. I met my wife here. She and I bought a mid-century bungalow in a decent neighbourhood when the price made sense. I built a pretty decent career in the energy business. I learned first to tolerate, then to like and then, eventually, to love Calgary. Love it enough to become a fairly vocal critic of what is wrong with the city and the province. But it’s my love for the place that makes me want it to be better—way better—than it is now.

“When we set out to create a community of technical scholars in Silicon Valley, there wasn’t much here and the rest of the world looked awfully big. Now the rest of the world is here.” — Fred Terman

As somebody who allows wishful thinking to still put PROGRAMMER on my passport application, that road not taken nearly three decades ago still haunts me a little from time-to-time. When I’m occasionally asked my opinion by somebody like me, except 30 years younger, I have to say “You write software for a living, right? Then you need to go where they write software.” For the most part, that’s not here.

Calgary is not Silicon Valley. Never was. Isn’t. Never will be.

To be candid, that is partly Calgary’s fault but also because not even Silicon Valley is really Silicon Valley, or at least the one of our imagination; a crazy idea gets sketched on the back of a napkin, millions of dollars get thrown at it, then it's the next Facebook and then you retire at 25. Yes, that happens, I suppose. Kind of like every once in a while somebody goes to Hollywood and becomes George Clooney or Jennifer Lawrence.

Make no mistake about it, though, Silicon Valley didn’t just happen. It was created. Not by Wozniak or Jobs or Page or Andreessen or Ellison or Zuckerberg or Musk. Rather it was many years before them, in 1951, by an unassuming university provost by the name of Fred Terman. What Mr. Terman did, in the fruit orchards near Stanford University, was see a need for the brightest and best minds from academia to co-mingle with venture capitalists and business executives.

Most significantly, Terman helped found the Stanford Industrial Park which turned out to be the catalytic event that launched what is arguably the greatest value creation engine the world has ever seen. You would have been hard pressed to know it at the time—it was little more than a real estate deal to attract light industrial tenants. When announced, one wonders if it warranted anything more than a paragraph below the fold in the San Jose Mercury or if even Terman knew the scope of the juggernaut he helped set on course.

“It is better to have one seven-foot jumper on your team than any number of six-foot jumpers.” — Fred Terman

Silicon Valley has been so successful that it does lead many to believe that we should simply ‘do whatever that Terman guy did’. Sorry to say but it is not that easy. One of the results of this oversimplification has been the fundamental and expensive failure of top heavy government programs to produce sustained results. Also true is the hack-n-slash, head-for-the-hills response of visible local business leadership which has been equally disappointing. Not to worry, though, the situation is sufficiently dire that there’s enough blame to go around for everybody.

What we fail to see in our superficial analysis is that while Terman’s ideas can be replicated, their original context simply cannot be. There were so many other factors in play which resulted in the once-in-a-lifetime Silicon Valley meteor blazing across the sky. Granted, some degree of Silicon Valley’s success has been re-created in other parts of the world. Those places are easy to spot—they all have progressively sillier sounding Silicon-something names. But key to their success was understanding what makes those places different and adapting actions to context and circumstances. That is what we need to do here.

What is useful is to ask ourselves a few hard questions: Who will be our Fred—or Freda—Terman be and what will be his or her vision for the harvest gold of our prairie? More importantly, are we tolerant and open-minded enough of The Crazy Ones who come up with these ideas? Are we astute enough to recognize the simple, unique, beautiful idea which will unleash the potential of this great city and province? And finally, do we have the patience for the long game that is required to be successful?

I am nowhere near smart enough to know the answers, but I am just smart enough to know we need to ask the questions.

©2016 Terence C. Gannon

If you prefer, you can listen to this essay as a podcast. This article previously appeared on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium on April 4, 2016. I welcome your comments below. If you enjoyed this article, I would appreciate it if you could share it with your social networks. (header photo: Stanford)