Missing: thought leaders in Asia’s tech industry

Here’s a question: what do these books all have in common?

The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen
The Four Steps to the Epiphany, by Steve Blank
The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries
Zero to One, by Peter Thiel

Yes, they’re all seminal tomes on startups and innovation. But more than that, they’re all written by Americans. Three of them come from Silicon Valley. You know where this is going, and you might roll your eyes and say: “Ugh, not another pundit comparing Asia to Silicon Valley.”

But there’s a larger truth here. Regardless of whether Silicon Valley is in the picture, Asia needs to play the thought leadership game if it wants to propel its startup ecosystems to a higher plane. Asian voices are missing, and that needs to change.

Let’s state the obvious: the US has a massive headstart on accumulating intellectual capital and innovation. Its leading universities – Harvard, Stanford, and MIT – had hundreds of years to create an unparalleled tradition of intellectual inquiry. Silicon Valley has its roots in military technology, and after the World Wars it transitioned towards semiconductors, computers, software, and the Internet.

The US is a leader in knowledge distribution at scale. New York City is the media capital of the world, and it’s now fueled by the network effects that made Facebook, another US product, dominant. The country pioneered the open source movement that made the software ecosystem what it is today, and led the development of massive open online courses (MOOCs), which aim to democratize higher education.

Couple the spirit of free inquiry with ownership of the fastlanes, and add that to English being the global lingua franca, and you have the ingredients for Silicon Valley’s status as the mecca of the tech world. It’s dishing mantras that we lap up without a second thought.

Yes it’s unfair to compare Asia to the US. But that’s not the end-goal. Rather, we should deconstruct what makes Silicon Valley successful, and see if there are pieces we can plant in our neighborhood.

Not just execution and exits, but ideas and education

What makes a successful ecosystem? For some, it’s about entrepreneurs getting their hands dirty and building world-class companies. But there’s no shortage of that. Execution and exits matter, but what’s equally important is the transfer of information from one generation of founders to the next. It’s about staying on the frontiers of knowledge. That’s what’s missing in Asia.

The US excels in this. It has universities which produced some of the world’s best internet companies along with cutting-edge management research. It pioneered the accelerator model, which systematically teaches startup knowledge using structured lessons and mentorship. Startup leaders share information openly and transparently, and they’re world-class communicators.

Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel is a good example. His book Zero to One shows how complex ideas can be communicated in a straightforward, concise, and clear manner. If you want a blueprint on what makes a great startup, that’s the go-to book. If you want the best nuts-and-bolts explanation of CAC and CLV and how both concepts relate to each other, that’s your ticket.

He’s a rare species: a proven entrepreneur, visionary, and lucid communicator. But in Silicon Valley, there’s enough people who possess some amount of these three qualities to go around.