Five years of lessons from Silicon Valley

Opinion: For five years, we have designed and led Vanguard, taking University of Auckland students to the San Francisco Bay Area to learn from one of the world’s most influential innovation ecosystems.

Tony Falkenstein’s generous philanthropy makes Vanguard possible. Around this opportunity, we have built an intensive learning experience drawing on relationships developed over years with founders, investors, alumni, technology leaders and educators.

Our work spans entrepreneurship education, venture development, investment, business, governance and ecosystem building. That means we look at what we encounter from several perspectives: the individual, the venture, the ecosystem and the society in which the first three sit. Something that looks successful at one level can look very different at another. After five years, it is increasingly the connections and contradictions between those levels that interest us.  

How quickly are you developing?

One phrase that stayed with us this year was learning velocity.

It came up in a number of contexts including founders whose roles are changing every three to six months. But the idea is much bigger than founders.

What struck us though was the seriousness with which many people approached their own development. Personal growth wasn’t adjacent to the work; it was part of the work. They sought feedback, developed their craft, surrounded themselves with people who knew more and deliberately worked on themselves. In addition, leaders were serious about recruiting people who demonstrated a commitment to development, a deep curiosity, high levels of adaptability and a desire for feedback. Learning velocity isn’t about consuming more information or simply moving faster. It is our capacity and commitment to keep developing as the demands around us change. That requires curiosity, humility and self-awareness.

For all of us, there is a useful question: are we developing at the rate our work, and the contribution we want to make, requires?

When making becomes easier, choosing matters more

AI introduces a related but different challenge – “life at AI speed”.

We are all experiencing a dramatic reduction in the effort required to produce things. Work that took days can take minutes. We can generate more analysis, content, code, features, ideas and options than ever before.

But our capacity to produce is accelerating far faster than our human capacity to absorb.

There is already plenty of AI slop. Organisations don’t have unlimited capacity for another report, initiative or change. Customers don’t have unlimited attention for another feature. And generating something is not the same as understanding it. Leaders are increasingly asking questions of their teams such as:” have you actually interrogated the analysis you just sent, or simply produced it?”; “have you applied deep critical thinking or accepted the AI output as given?”; “are the efficiencies gained by AI creating space for deep reflection, critical thought and curiosity not just more busy work?”

When making becomes easier, choosing becomes harder and more important. Do we deeply understand the problem? Does anyone actually want this? Just because we can build something, should we?

As the cost of creation falls, judgement, taste, discernment and restraint may become more valuable, not less.

What survives the bust?

Five years also lets you observe cycles. Technologies rise. Capital floods in and retreats. Companies that appeared unstoppable disappear.

But much of their capability survives. People take experience elsewhere. Technical knowledge moves. Relationships endure. Employees become founders; founders become investors or mentors. Lessons from one venture reappear in another.

Failure can look very different depending on where you stand: devastating for an individual, fatal for a company, yet potentially generative for an ecosystem.

We measure ecosystems through startups created, capital raised and exits. Perhaps another measure of strength is how effectively an ecosystem retains and recirculates capability when individual ventures don’t succeed.  

New Zealand’s ecosystem doesn’t stop at our coastline

If circulation matters, geography starts to look more interesting too.

The Bay Area’s density of talent, capital, experience and relationships is extraordinary. New Zealand increasingly has pockets of density of its own. The useful question is not whether we can replicate Silicon Valley’s concentration (we can’t), but what kinds of density matter, where they matter and how effectively we connect them.

New Zealand has recognised the value of its diaspora for decades. Through our work in San Francisco, Singapore, Australia, India, the UK and elsewhere, we continue to be struck by how willing New Zealanders offshore are to share knowledge, make introductions and open doors. Are we making enough of that advantage?

Talent doesn’t only flow outwards. People want to live here. Our environment, culture, quality of life and values can be part of our innovation proposition.

There is a cultural dimension too. We have become increasingly convinced that New Zealanders should take our Kiwi ways with us, not shed them in bigger markets. Our informality, pragmatism, ability to connect across hierarchies and instinct to get on with things can be strengths, alongside the values and perspectives we bring from Aotearoa.

The challenge is pairing those qualities with confidence and global ambition. Too often we can arrive in larger markets assuming everyone else knows more or belongs there more. Again and again, we have seen that the rooms look much bigger from the outside. We can turn up as ourselves, compete and win on the world stage.

Auckland to San Francisco is an overnight flight: dinner, a movie, sleep. Build in New Zealand. Connect globally. Travel when proximity matters. Relocate when and where the needs of the market or venture demand it, not because we assume global ambition requires leaving New Zealand.

Innovation and progress are not synonyms

There is a bigger level still: society.

It is discombobulating to leave a Bay Area company working at the frontier of technology and, minutes later, encounter profound homelessness, addiction and deprivation, then enter another room discussing extraordinary wealth and technologies promising to change humanity.

The causes are complex. But the coexistence forces a question: what do we mean by the world’s “best” innovation ecosystem? Best at what?

Creating billion-dollar companies? Attracting capital? Solving important problems? Distributing the benefits of innovation? Creating communities in which people flourish?

Innovation and progress are not synonyms. New Zealand can learn from ecosystems further along than ours, not only from what they have achieved, but from the contradictions their success has not resolved.  

The learning is in the tension

This is why Vanguard isn’t designed to give students a neat set of lessons about Silicon Valley.

Almost everything they could know about it is available from Auckland. Information is abundant. Experience is different.

Students encounter extraordinary ambition and its consequences; speed and the need for judgement; success and failure; ideas they agree with and ideas they challenge. Then we create space to interrogate those experiences together.

Intensity alone isn’t transformational; it can simply be exhausting. The educational work is turning exposure and dissonance into reflection, recalibration and discernment.

Students discover that people they considered impossibly successful have failed, pivoted, doubted themselves and started again. The distance between “people like that” and “people like me” shrinks.

But proximity reveals something else too: what extraordinary achievement can require. Building a globally significant company, whether competing in an existing category or creating an entirely new one, can demand extraordinary focus, discipline, hours and sacrifice. Those are choices about time, relationships, health, risk and what else matters in your life.

Seeing both the possibility and the price matters. The lesson is not “want this life”. Instead, it is to understand what is possible, understand what it requires, and then choose deliberately.

Transformation isn’t predetermined movement in one direction. A student can become more globally ambitious and more committed to building from New Zealand. They can realise they could become a founder and decide they don’t want to.

Our purpose isn’t to tell students what to think. It is to expand what they can imagine, help them understand what different choices might require, and strengthen their capacity to decide for themselves.

Great ecosystems recycle more than capital

Vanguard itself is a small example of this circulation.

Tony’s philanthropy makes the programme possible. We combine it with programme design, innovation and entrepreneurship knowledge, educational expertise and networks built and nurtured over many years. Others contribute knowledge, relationships, time and access. Students receive extraordinary opportunities and, we hope, eventually create opportunities for others.

Healthy ecosystems aren’t neatly engineered. They grow and evolve through countless interactions, although we can cultivate conditions that help those interactions flourish and compound.

Great ecosystems recycle more than financial capital. They recycle talent, knowledge, experience, relationships, opportunity and generosity.

For New Zealand, the opportunity is not to reproduce somebody else’s ecosystem. It is to build on what is distinctive about ours: to connect our pockets of capability to each other and the world, draw exceptional people towards us, activate New Zealanders wherever they are, and give more people the confidence to turn up and compete globally without leaving behind who we are.

Five years of Vanguard have made us more ambitious about what is possible from New Zealand, but also more discerning about what is worth pursuing. Perhaps that is the combination that matters: ambition without imitation, global confidence grounded in who we are, and the judgement to build things that genuinely deserve to exist.