If you want to get a sense of the insane speed at which things happen in Silicon Valley these days, you could pick one of the really prominent examples: Uber, say, which had no particular profile in 2011, yet in June this year was valued at a comical $18bn. Or you could pick one of many stories such as Leo Seigal’s. Seigal is a British entrepreneur who came to San Francisco halfway through a languages degree at Oxford. He let the university believe he was heading to France for his study year abroad; moved back in with his parents in London instead; co-founded a startup that helps celebrities run charity auctions online; then moved it to the US west coast. He’s now on his second company,Represent, a service allowing users to create branded merchandise online, which employs 26 people and has attracted more than $1m in venture capital funding. He tells stories of forging business relationships with everyone from One Direction to George RR Martin, and makes pronouncements like an exhausted veteran: “Honestly,” he told me recently, squinting against the sun on the rooftop terrace of his LA offices, “if I’d known how hard it would really be, back then, I don’t know if I would have done it.” Seigal, it probably ought to be clarified, is 23 – “and a half,” he adds. “Back then” refers to his arrival in Silicon Valley – which was at the beginning of last year.
There has never been an economy quite like that of west coast tech startups in 2014: no environment in which it’s been so easy for the right kind of person, with the right kind of idea, to go from nobody to worth millions in weeks, their app downloaded to a million smartphones. The results, as it’s often been noted, aren’t always that inspiring: an awful lot of companies seem to exist to solve the minor problems of privileged twentysomethings, such as ordering a takeaway more efficiently, or just to undertake actively cynical profiteering: there’s an app that sells restaurant reservations to the highest bidder. Still, there’s something undeniably intoxicating about eavesdropping on the excited conversations taking place in Blue Bottle Coffee, or the deals being discussed in Mission Dolores Park(provided you can dodge the guy taking his drone for a walk). This pregnant sense of possibility is what prompts more than 13,000 people to migrate each year to Silicon Valley, from across America and the rest of the world. And it is what motivates a small but apparently increasing number of British people, each year, to abandon their plans for university, get on a plane, find an apartment-share, struggle with the ceaseless hassles of getting the right visa – and begin doing what the would-be billionaires of Silicon Valley do all the time, even when they’re not at work, which is work.
“It’s the craziest thing, being out here,” Seigal says, sounding slightly astonished. He is wearing deck shoes, sporting a few days of stubble, and has just expressed his annoyance that his companies have finally hired an employee younger than him. “In most regular professions, I feel like it takes 10, 20 years to rise up, whereas we went from nobodies, who no one wanted to meet, to within a year, you’ve got such-and-such a celebrity [on board], and everyone’s suddenly interested. I’ve got friends who go into the entertainment industry, working in the mailroom, and now we’re working with their bosses.”
The idea for his first startup, Prizeo, came from conducting charity auctions at university, specifically one involving Jeremy Clarkson. A wealthy Top Gear fan at an auction might bid thousands of pounds to go racetrack driving with Clarkson, Seigal realised, but a smartphone-based raffle system could raise far more cash by selling a shot at winning to far more people for a smaller amount, such as £5. (Prizeo profits by taking a percentage of funds raised.) A successful collaboration with Jamie Oliver caught the attention of investors; later, the creator of Game Of Thrones accompanied one raffle-winner on a helicopter trip to a wolf sanctuary.
“It’s ridiculous,” Seigal says. “I mean, I’m not easily starstruck, but when you’re emailing personally back and forth with George RR Martin…” Not that this was necessarily his most pinch-yourself moment. That came “when we went to meet our friend at Facebook, and it was really late at night, and there was no one else there – except Mark Zuckerberg. And we were, like, oh my God.”
People have been trying to become internet multimillionaires in Silicon Valley for two decades now, of course; but in the last six or seven years, something’s changed. Any one person’s shot at success is still a question of very long odds and huge luck. But the process of trying to discover the next Zuckerberg, or the next Twitter, has been systematised: the Valley has become a Darwinian machine for vacuuming up youngsters, giving them just enough cash to test their ideas, then injecting massive quantities of money into a handful of victors in an effort to force the birth of an Uber or Airbnb every year or so. At the heart of this system is the startup incubator Y Combinator, founded by the British investor Paul Graham and based near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View. Twice a year, in winter and summer, it accepts about 60 small teams, writes them each a $120,000 cheque in return for roughly a 7% stake in future earnings, then gives them three months – sharing apartments nearby, working every hour of every day – to build their projects. (During the selection process, Graham reportedly asks each team: “What’s your long-term plan to take over the world?”) The event at the end of this period, “Demo Day”, a Dragons’ Den-style event in which each company showcases its work to the region’s leading investors, has become the stuff of legend.
“It was incredibly stressful,” says Seigal, who was admitted to Y Combinator last year. “But at the same time, it was a haven. Especially coming from London, where you feel really abnormal – here you’re praised as what it’s all about. It felt like we could do what we were doing without being asked questions. It’s just accepted that we’d like to become multimillionaires, and that we might have a shot at it.” Like other British founders in the US, he strives to be diplomatic about “Silicon Roundabout”, London’s rival technology cluster. But he can’t conceal his feeling that the west coast is where it’s at. Things move too slowly in the UK (“I’ve always been obsessed with doing as much as possible as young as possible – I’m just extremely impatient”) and it is harder to get funding. “I don’t want to be too harsh on London, because I’d like to encourage people,” Seigal says. “But at the end of the day, the benchmark for success for companies is Silicon Valley: how quickly can you get there?”
Not every British founder is so eager to get to the west coast as quickly as possible. Robyn Exton, the founder of Dattch, a dating app for gay and bisexual women, loved the atmosphere in London in her company’s earliest days. (Again, we’re talking the last couple of years.) “It was just so supportive,” says the 28-year-old, who grew up in Kent. They were supportive partly because “everyone was really desperate for there to be some big success stories”. Exton raised funds by working at a pub near her home in Hoxton, then was accepted to Wayra, the startup incubator backed by the Spanish firm Telefónica, and then raised £100,000 in investment. Her goal was to establish that there was space in the market for a dating network aimed exclusively at women. “The way the female brain processes information, the things women are looking for, it’s so different,” she argues. Accordingly, Dattch emphasises certain features more than other dating apps, such as messaging (“Women want to talk so much more than men do before meeting up in person”) and downplays others, such as geolocation, because there’s less interest in impromptu hook-ups. But now that the network has launched in six American cities, Exton is shifting her focus, too; she spends half her time in the US and expects she’ll spend more. Silicon Valley’s magnetic force can be resisted for only so long.
The Valley’s way of seeking the Next Big Thing naturally rewards a certain kind of person: ambitious, most often male, usually from a comfortable background and with sufficiently few attachments to drop everything and come to the Bay Area. One result is that the age of participants in schemes such as Y Combinator seems always to be falling; the year before last, west coast venture capitalists told Reuters they were funding more chief executives under 21 years old than ever before. “At a certain point,” the investor and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen was quoted as saying, “they can’t get much younger, or we’re going to be invested in preschool.” Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and a well-known libertarian (he’s supported schemes for floating cities at sea, out of reach of tax authorities) has become the leader of a movement actively encouraging potential founders to jettison university and focus on business instead. This June, his foundation announced the latest batch of Thiel Fellows, 20 young people aged between 17 and 20, who’ll each receive $100,000 over two years for projects ranging from “accelerating how we learn” to curing cancer, providing they skip higher education.
A strange consequence of all this is a surreal kind of ageism that views those in their late 20s as getting dangerously close to being past it: 32 is “the cutoff in investors’ heads”, Graham has said. (“I feel like I have maybe 15 years,” Seigal tells me; as with the other founders I speak to, the question of where he might end up beyond that seems too abstract to make much sense.) Earlier this year, a report in the New Republic noted that Valley-area cosmetic surgeons were doing good business giving botox injections to men in their 30s and 40s.
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“Every generation that came before us had to make a choice in life between pursuing a steady career and pursuing wild adventures,” Po Bronson wrote in The Nudist On The Late Shift, his chronicle of the first dotcom bubble of the mid-90s. “In Silicon Valley, that trade-off has been recircuited. By injecting mindboggling amounts of risk into the stodgy domain of grey-suited business, young people no longer have to choose… More happens here and so quickly, satisfying anybody’s craving for newness. In six months, you might get a job, be laid off, start a company, sell it, become a consultant, and then, who knows?” Bronson’s book is a vivid, manic account of trying to make it at the epicentre of tech, yet in places it feels oddly nostalgic: some of his fresh-faced pioneers are almost 30, and their $1,400 monthly apartment rentals wouldn’t get you much in San Francisco today.
