China v India- brought home to me…

At the fortune global forum, New Delhi, and, got really involved in a conversation around how China and India were different. I will not try and put together a laundry list of what is different- enough has been said about democracy (and the lack thereof), infrastructure (and the lack thereof) etc., however, I think One particular interchange really got across the point to me.

The panel on Indian growth was asked a question about why india's performance in sports did not reflect the size of population (in short, it "sucks"), and why India could not do what China did, and improve sports performance. On introspection, my view is the following:

China is quite capable of taking a problem, and putting together an army to work on this problem, and churn out oceans of athletes, swimmers, sports players, etc, but I cannot ever imagine India doing that. Things are much too free flowing, much too democratic, and much too "free willed" for the country to go from Zero to 100 medals in 2 olympics… things will happen, but they will happen much slower, and will happen with consensus- people need to have bought in etc.

Now the good part is that people's opinion will count. The bad part is that things do not get done..the issue seems to be- there is no organization- and hence Brownian movement prevails- every individual doing a bunch of things by themselves- which makes for brilliant individuals (hence the demand for Indian talent), but does not make for a very cohesive society.

There is something about the Silicon Valley…

We all read about it- how the valley is what it is because of the confluence of various factors: VC money, top universities, very high entrepreneur activity, a great ability to attract talent, and of course, a great climate. The Valley has been the bellwether for technology innovation and we have read about it. But reading about it is not the same as experiencing it…

I happen to work in a role that takes me to the valley regularly, and every time I get here, it gives me new food for thought. Since I am spending an extended period of time here this visit, I am hoping to explore what is happening in the valley around some of the newer phenomena such as Social networks etc. And I still marvel and how this part of the world is indeed just that little bit ahead of the rest of the world…

I was at this event that focused on this entirely new space that is being created around building applications on Facebook, and met a few people there that brought home to me the "valley effect".

For instance, I met this "power youngster"- Mike Sego who developed the fluff-friends application for Facebook, this application is currently on 2.1 million profiles on Facebook, and is valued at $ 1.5 Million. He has graduated in 2003, works with Google, and developed this application in his spare time. The panache and aplomb with which he was handling queries and telling us his story about how he developed this application was just admirable- and he definitely symbolized what was different about the valley for me…

Or my interactions with Blake Commagere, whose love of horror movies and sheer persistence with asking for "help" translated to building applications such as Zombie, Vampires and Werewolf on Facebook. He described to us with a little apologetic hand-wringing, how people found great pleasure in biting/ sucking blood etc from their friends…

Or, take my interactions with Naval Ravikant, a VC who had a lot to do with Epinions from the dot com bubble days, and the razor insight and clarity he brought to how he made decisions on what to invest – which gave me quite a few views on where this entire space was going.

Or, my conversations with Murtaza from peanutlabs.com, a business that has been able to monetize presence on Facebook.

A closing comment-one interesting insight I got out of my interactions is that there seems to be a higher tolerance to failure here in the valley. People are not afraid of taking risks, and consequently failing, indeed, it seems to be celebrated, which, I suppose, has something to do with why the valley is and will possibly continue to be the hub of innovation for technology…