BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Actually, Culture Does Shape Entrepreneurs

Following
This article is more than 10 years old.

The following post is by Ronen Shilo, founder, chairman and CEO of Conduit, a provider of cloud-based solutions that empower Web and mobile publishers to engage their users across multiple platforms. An inventor at heart, Ronen holds a B.Sc. in computer science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

 A lot of people say that technology is a universal language.

At least that’s what most of us in the tech world seem to think. After all, computer code is fundamentally neutral, it doesn't speak with an accent – like I do – or pay any attention to politics. It’s too busy doing what code does.

What’s more, wherever I go in the world, tech companies — and the people who work there — tend to look the same. Have you noticed that? We don’t dress up; most of us only wear a suit (at best) to weddings or funerals, and sometimes we have to borrow a tie. Our offices usually look the same, too, especially startups: open space in an old, industrial building (if you can find one), located in a hip and decidedly non-corporate neighborhood. And if that’s not available, just find some cheap space where you can work 24/7 and offer energy drinks, ping pong, and free lunch to your engineers.

But dig below the surface and you’ll find it’s very different. No one, not even technology companies, can escape the oxygen of the culture they breathe. The imprinting mechanisms are too deep, the social structures too pervasive. Indeed, we are where we came from.

I’ve lived and worked in Silicon Valley and in Israel, and travelled a lot, so my observations come from what I’ve seen, absorbed and read. For example, I don’t think Facebook could have been born anywhere — and grown as fast — outside of the United States. True, there are now 900 million members globally, but it was in America where the brand gained its initial traction. And America, as any foreigner who’s spent any time there can tell you, is the friendliest country in the world. (Yes, even, and maybe especially, New York.) Whenever I travel to New York, I can't believe how warm and open most people are. You can learn more about someone between the 55th floor and the lobby than you can learn working with someone in France or England for five years.

LinkedIn is another example of the American culture, digitally expressed. In America, networking is considered an art; elsewhere in the world, it’s often seen as just pushy. You know that “How You’re Connected” graphic in LinkedIn that displays your first- and second-degree connections? In many cultures, that’s not transparency. It’s intrusiveness.

Facebook and LinkedIn are no different than popular American exports like McDonald’s or Starbucks or Woody Allen. Originality starts with a local set of values, and adoption follows.

In France, where the culture celebrates food, design, and aesthetics, there is enormous energy around startups in those categories. As Roxanne Verza, a blogger at TechBaguette, puts it, “…local companies do seem to be innovating more when it comes to their cultural roots. Fashion websites, food-related sites and obviously dating websites seem to be all the rage.” One of the sites she references is Super Marmite, a platform that allows individuals to both cook and sell food for like-minded foodies.

On the other hand, the French reverence for food – you’ve got to eat it when the chef WANTS you to eat it - doesn’t work well with delivery services like Seamless – which is hugely successful in New York, Chicago, Boston and L.A.  As a blog called “2 Yanks in Paris” wrote:  “Some things are still mysteries (can you get any restaurant type take-out food delivered in Paris??”

In Sweden, an entirely different culture, the local climate helped create the conditions for Spotify. Wired notes that Daniel Ek, the company’s founder, is a “product of Scandinavia’s rich hacker tradition.”

Some say that Korea, not known to be a startup culture, is burdened by its heritage. Hamish Mckenzie writes in PandoDaily that “However uncomfortable it may be to admit, it is difficult to deny that Confucianism and startup culture are almost incompatible.”

In Israel, where I’ve founded my own startups — most recently Conduit (which I am proud to say is the first Israeli Internet company valued at over $1 billion) — the culture works in expected and unexpected ways. Size matters. The vastness of America contributes to bold and ambitious thinking. We are a tiny country forced to make the most out of every square meter. We work small.  (The same is true of the Japanese, but for other cultural reasons they have not become a technology hothouse.)

So we optimize within constraints.  When I think about Conduit – which started with the unloved toolbar space at the top of your screen – I realize that it’s the equivalent of transforming the desert. So too with Wibiya, a company we acquired, that has brought innovation to the bottom of your screen, as far below the fold as you can get.

The role of the military in Israeli life also shapes our entrepreneurship, as the book Start-Up Nation has written eloquently about. Mandatory military service means that many who serve gain deep proficiency in computer science and engineering, and they take those skills with them. A perfect example is Face.com, a facial recognition company that was recently acquired by Facebook.

The military also shapes our business culture in another way. The fact that everyone serves, and every child knows it, yields a tough and focused group of young people who are trained to master both independence and collaboration, skills that are at the heart of successful entrepreneurship. However free-wheeling the startup culture may seem, business is still a discipline.

The difference in cultures even reaches into the way language works.  I recently came across a fascinating research paper by Alice de Koning and Sarah Drakapoulou Dodd, which examines different metaphorical descriptions of entrepreneurship across cultures. They write:

“… for the United Kingdom and Canada, the entrepreneur, although necessary for economic development, is a dangerous outsider, a greedy, shady and selfish transgressor of social norms. In Australia, he is portrayed as a swash-buckling hero… In the U.S. the emphasis is on the morally perfect legend of the little guy who wins out against the large-scale by dint of his vision, hard-work and integrity, combined with magical skills. The Indian perception… places more weight on the need for external support… on collective action. Failure is a just punishment in the U.K. and Canada, a heroic defeat in Australia, one of the inevitable pitfalls of enterprise in India, and a risk well worth taking in the U.S.”

But not everything is culture. Necessity matters. Matters a lot. That’s why we’re seeing an explosion of mobile payment systems in Africa. The unbanked population is large and mobile penetration is high. Consider this startling stat: the U.S. economy is nine times the size of Africa’s, but Africa has nine times as many cell phones. MXIt and FloCash are just two examples of the explosion of startups in the mobile space that Forbes has covered extensively.

Of course, there are exceptions, which I expect to see in the comment thread. I don’t think there’s anything unique to Estonia that precipitated Skype, for example. (If there is, that’s a testimony to my deep ignorance of Estonia.)

Why is all this important? Because technology and entrepreneurship are drivers of economic growth.  Experts and think tanks spend time and money figuring out the unique conditions for success. In pursuit of the magic ingredients, they delve into the ecosystem of venture capitalists, world-class universities, law firms, and other support systems.

Those factors matter. But culture matters, too. Even more, at times. I’ve seen it myself. The right product in the wrong culture is wrong, period. The world is both a global village, and a collection of very different neighborhoods. The greatest success will come to those who speak the language of both.