Hi everyone, welcome to the A6NC Podcast. Today we're talking about startup and innovation ecosystems.

I know. Those are a pretty loaded set of buzzwords. In this case, though, it actually really is an ecosystem because we're talking about cities, communities of entrepreneurs, governments, universities, companies, and others.

And we want to talk about what makes these innovation ecosystems around the world work or not,

especially since the question we hear often, for better or worse, is how to create the

next Silicon Valley.

The notion of trying to create the next Silicon Valley is completely the wrong question.

And it's a wrong question for lots of reasons.

So that's why we have three special guests on the pod today who are experts in different

aspects of this topic.

Annalise Saxonyan, who's the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information and a longtime

researcher who has studied competitive advantage around the world.

Brad Feld, VC at Foundry Group in Colorado and the author of the book Startup Communities,

and who has written a lot about the power of networks over hierarchies.

And Chris Schroeder, who's a serial entrepreneur and investor,

and who also once served in the staff of former Secretaries of State.

He wrote the book Startup Rising last year,

which was one of the first books to document the phenomenon of startups in the Middle East,

and more recently he's written about the impact of software-eating the world and how that's been playing out in Iran.

So let's start by having you guys talk about what makes a successful innovation cluster like Silicon Valley.

I'm not even sure if that's the right assumption for us to begin from, given the question and given how many of those

government-led experiments have failed. But since the three of you have different perspectives

on this topic, I think it'd be great for us to begin there.

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