What Are Some Things I'd Be Shocked To Learn About The World Outside Of Silicon Valley?

1.  50 Shades of Grey grew to 35 million ‘users’ more quickly than Instagram did.

2. Most of Silicon Valley is focused on building products for the top 1% of the world’s population. Most of the world needs solutions to problems we rarely talk about, in areas like health care, agricultural production, sustainable construction, citizen activism and empowerment, childhood education, affordable transportation, supply chain optimization, community solidarity and efficacy, etc. And I’m not solely referring to base of the pyramid topics (like clean water access), either. The average “middle class” citizen outside the US doesn’t have as much luxury to indulge in existential crisis and loneliness.

3.  Most of the world is not 16-29 year old males. There’s a whole range of perspectives that go underrepresented in Silicon Valley. There are a lot of women out there. Older folks. Also, it might be hard to imagine, but there are a lot of kids not growing up on video games.

4.  Given the above two points, the emergent ‘morality’ of the products Silicon Valley creates can be limited and not particulalry reflective of much of the world’s compass. All products inherit the values of their creators and have a sort of corresponding ‘morality.’  When you create an algorithm, it’s optimizing for something — it might be that you think “saving time” is a value worth optimizing for. Or it could be that what you’re trying to optimize for is quantity (quantity of access, of distribution), which can often come at the cost of quality and depth of interaction. Or like most of us who are successful Americans, we automatically assume that our stance on individual rights and belief in the individualistic survival of the fittest / the elite will rise are “ideal” or “optimal.” Another example is our cultural bias towards the “cult of the celebrity.” And we tend to measure success by economic output.

These assumptions aren’t necessarily true or as relevant or perhaps ideal for a large part of the world, yet we often imbue the products we create with these values.

I’m not saying any of this is good or bad, it’s just worth thinking about. What are the values you are imbuing your product with? Do they fit into your vision of the future? Be thoughtful not only about all of the stuff we talk about openly (design, business model, user interaction, hiring, and culture) but also be thoughtful about this stuff too.

5.  And what other people say here is true:

Houses that cost over $1 million are rare, even in other wealthy countries. Most people’s friends are not millionaires. Most people don’t know people who have retired at age 35.

Most people have never heard of Instagram, Square, Dropbox, or AirBnB.

Most people don’t live on Coke or organic green tea drinks.

Most people don’t “calendar in” their friends.

Most people don’t follow the stock performance of Zynga/Facebook and pepper their daily conversations with who has raised what, or how much startup X was acquired for. Probably they are too busy following cricket scores!

The models for success are not solely limited to being a college dropout genius or being an MIT/Stanford grad.

Most people don’t feel inadequate if they don’t know how to code.

Being emotionally expressive or emotionally sensitive is a virtue in some parts of the world.