Name: Can the U.K. replicate Silicon Valley?
Uploaded: 2014-04-09
Duration: 4 min 19 s
Description: Joanna Shields, CEO of Tech City, is trying to recreate Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial spirit by building an innovation hub in East London.

Joanna, we'll start with you. Before becoming the CEO of Text City you were a Vice President at Facebook, because we heard from Caroline Everson earlier, and, President of Vivo. And you started your career in Silicon Valley, so I'm going to ask the actual, the obvious question. Are you trying to recreate Silicon Valley, here in the UK? Yeah, it's a question that everyone asks us, so I'm, I'm really happy that you, you brought it up today because, I think the most important thing to notice that every city or region has its own sorta strengths, and from the universities that are there, from the companies that were born there, and succeeded there. And so the culture of Tech City, or any of the other 20- some clusters across the UK, all have a different feeling and culture. So we have eight great technology areas in the UK that we are good at. Things from space to satellites to, you know, semiconductors as well as, you know, digital media and tech, which you find a lot of in East London. Digital, printing, 3D printing. So it's a really diverse set of technologies. But each of the clusters has their own identity and their own strengths. One tends to think of entrepreneurs as a, a little bit of you know, lone rangers. That they, especially in today's environment where there are so many technological tools available to entrepreneurs, you could get started anywhere in the world. I think the reality is you can get started anywhere in the world. We find ourselves in places like Minsk, which we haven't been to, I wouldn't really recommend going. [ LAUGH ]. And the reason is because the, the cost and the ease of starting companies has just gone in different directions, right? Ten years ago, you would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, just to sort of have bandwidth access, and that's now only cost a few thousand. You would have to employ, tens of engineers to sort of write the code, and now you have open source software. You'd have to spend a lot in marketing, to actually sell your product and now you access to hundreds of millions of users whether you're on, Amazon, on Google through just selling, buying AdWords, or on the iPhone, or even Android. So the whole ecosystem within reason, people get started, and the ability to get products to market is fundamentally different than it was ten years ago. And as a result, we really say that Silicon Valley does not have [ UNKNOWN ] pure innovation. It doesn't. So we see great companies everywhere. How much of running a business versus us starting a business is access to human capital? It's all about the people, you know. If you think about what creates a cluster, and what, you know, why is Silicon Valley what it is, it's people, it's ideas. And of course, it's all the enabling institutions. Whether that's government, it's patent laws, it's immigration reform, it's money, which is what we represent. But it's really a combination of those three. And the places that are the most trusted are the most mature. So if you really think about why people go to a hub, or whatever you want to call it, it's really about talent. And it can be different talent. It can be commercial talent or it can be tech talent. Sounds like your saying Silicon Valley might be a little over, though [ LAUGH ]. What a thing to say. The way I think about Silicon Valley is it's not just a collection of ingredients. I think of it truly as a philosophy. It's a brand. And what it is, is the fundamental belief that not only is it a possibility, but that success is your prerogative. It's that unfettered belief you see in a 20 year- old entrepreneur. Is that audacity American? Or is that unique to that particular part of the world [ CROSSTALK ] Could you have that mentality anywhere else? So we also have this debate all the time. And you know when we first got started it was like, you know, there's no way that there's venture capitalists possibly anywhere else. I won't bore you with that debate. Because we have some great companies we produce in this region and globally. I think it has a lot to do with culture. A lot. And beyond that it has to do with the fact that it's possible. The U. S. really celebrates its -. Success. Its success. We don't do that in other countries. The mentality, in the, in the U. S. is such that everyone, want, believes they can be a success, they can be an entrepreneur, they can be a Mark Zuckerberg.

Joanna Shields, CEO of Tech City, is trying to recreate Silicon Valley&#039;s entrepreneurial spirit by building an innovation hub in East London.