Under the microscope

It’s a bizarre experience to work at a company about whom a news story appears in the media at least once an hour. Reporters have even been known to hide in our bushes, so we now have security guards in the car park, ready to shoo away anyone who comes poking around.

This is one of the interesting things about living in Silicon Valley. I could move back to The Netherlands and spend the next 500 years working at a couple of hundred fresh, exciting, new companies, but I guarantee you that not one of them would ever come in for the attention that this one does.

How come?

It comes down to the difference in mentality between Americans and the Dutch (but not just the Dutch, of course; substitute any other European country here). In business, Americans — especially denizens of The Valley as it’s called around here — view the sky as the limit. Ideas that would be dismissed as fantasy elsewhere, receive massive funding here and come to life.

Of course, those ideas are fantasy, but that’s not the point. The point is that they can be made into reality by hard work, brilliance and not a small amount of luck. There’s one other quality that’s required however: sheer, unfettered imagination; and that’s where we sober Dutch come a little unstuck. We have good ideas, but immediately consign our more fantastically conceived ones to cloud cuckoo land.

But Silicon Valley is cloud cuckoo land. Here, no idea is too brilliant — or, as we’ve seen all too often in recent years, too idiotic — for its conceiver to dismiss it as not representing a viable business model. Thanks to venture capital funding and a plethora of rich potential angel investors always looking for the next big thing, it’s possible to obtain the necessary backing to get your idea off the ground.

In The Netherlands, in contrast, you’d be laughed at.

“It’s 1998 and you want to start a search-engine? Er, have you seen Yahoo?

Alta Vista? Excite? Search-engines are an established phenomenon and this

area is a solved problem.”

Being Dutch myself, I thought much the same thing back when I first started using Google, but it just goes to show you what is possible with, yes, that unfettered imagination I spoke of earlier, plus all of the other ingredients I mentioned and probably a few more elements too intangible for me to readily quantify.

That said, there’s nothing quite like home. What the Dutch lack in imagination, they make up for socially. The Yanks may be flamboyant in business, but they’re ultra-conservative in most other regards and living in the US can be a remarkably remote and stifling experience.

The Dutch are quite the opposite, so whilst I may have trouble finding an interesting job after Google, I’ll at least be able to know that my future children will be living in a place where prime-time television doesn’t consist of women engaging in expensive plastic surgery in order to become worthy of the moniker The Swan.