Landing a space rocket on a floating barge made to look easy
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I am just back from San Francisco. I had the Mamas and The Papas in my head as we drove in from airport. Indeed, as the drizzle blew off the bay, all the leaves were brown and the sky was suitably grey. We passed the vast billboards for tech companies advertising their latest gizmo to other aspirant unicorns who had bought billboards on the same freeway. The place was full of surprises: but not the surprises I’d expected. We explored the city, piers, cable car, Union Square and cheered an 8:5 win for the Giants. All seemed good with the world in northern California, except for the weather. But then we began to look closer.
Travelling into the Valley, the traffic on the 101 was cliche-bustlingly terrible. The Google buses had removed their branding, but not their bike racks. Their glass was now tempered and tinted, so rocks thrown from bridges wouldn't hurt the engineers bused in from cheaper postcodes. Guided by LBS’s Peter Hinssen, we visited Sunnyvale and Palo Alto, met four start-ups, four scale-ups, a health focused accelerator, a VC, and enough guest speakers to make our heads burst! We stood outside the the Garage of Hewlett and Packard, the “birthplace” of Silicon Valley from ninety years earlier. As we returned from the Valley, we gawped passing lovely Atherton. Bloomberg had just ran a story highlighting Atherton as the second richest postcode in the whole of the USA, with the average income over $1.5 million according to analysis of 2015 IRS data. Atherton's neighbours include Stanford University and Menlo Park, home to Facebook and various fast growing tech companies. Some of the best paid people with the smartest minds in the world are concentrated in a small town of just 7,000 people.
As the evening mist and breeze chilled the air, we returned to our central San Francisco Hotel, just a few hundred metres from the Crystal Meth fuelled fringes of the City. The place may zing with the vibrancy of the new digital, tech, AI, Blockchain economy, but in its homeless problem surfaces a grim reality of lives lived without a social safety net. There are approximately 7,000 recognised homeless in the City, and more arrive each day. Strangely, no one asked me for money which made the plight even more unnerving.
The bay area is a region that created the most valuable enterprises on the planet. Not content with making our shopping, browsing, entertainment and connected lives so much better than we could ever have imagined a decade ago, firms like Apple, Google, Facebook, and others, continue to innovate brilliantly and make their own "dent in the Universe." Elon Musk is rightly revered for the smarts he has brought to market from payments, to electric cars, to now sending rockets into space with SpaceX; landing them upright, intact and re-usable on a floating barge in an ocean hundreds of miles away.
In the comfort of the cool Hotel bar we mused. How can a place of such imagination, innovation and creativity; a place imbued with values of diversity and respect for difference, also be a place where its wealth creators drive each day over free-way bridges, under which citizens die? Many of the wealth creators like Gates and Zuckerberg have committed billions to charitable causes, research and philanthropic endeavours all over the world. But in this beautiful City, the homeless still shout at themselves, lost, confused and deranged. We had no easy answers and there have been thirty years of well intentioned public policy attempts and initiatives to help alleviate the problem. But maybe if the uber-smart and visionary minds nearby can land a reusable space-ship on a floating barge, perhaps some corner of those minds could be briefly applied to solving the issue of 7,000 homeless?
