The Tribune

By NICOLE BURROWS

Nick Woodman is the founder and CEO of GoPro, a $10bn tech company that makes mountable sporting video cameras, based in Silicon Valley, California.

Woodman, who not only studied but also grew up in Silicon Valley, was recently interviewed by a BBC reporter who asked him about the secret to his company’s success and the success of almost every company that originates in Silicon Valley.

“Silicon Valley was growing all around me as I was growing up”, Woodman said. “My friends and I, many of us, thought that this is just what you do; you graduate from college, and you have a good idea, and you go start a business around it and try to make it successful.

“That’s a big part of why you see so many entrepreneurs flock to Silicon Valley. So many successful businesses spawn from there because of the momentum that exists there, of the mindset, the perspective that people have, that this is just what you do.”

Prior to GoPro, Woodman enjoyed surfing and simply wanted to take action shots of himself enjoying his recreation time. After one failed entrepreneurial attempt when he graduated from college, and now having worked for 12 years on his second and successful attempt, his current company, which began as a “wearable video camera company”, is flourishing, having gone public this year.

Woodman had - and saw - a need, a simple idea of how to resolve it, the fertile soil of his mind which was already trained to invent/create, and access to venture capital funds. And now he’s worth $4.8bn, all because his creativity was nurtured throughout his entire life and then supported and solidified with financial investment to lead to the development of a highly innovative product.

Silicon Valley, the home of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, the microprocessor and the microcomputer, the southern San Francisco Bay area of northern California, is an innovation centre of the world – built on the principle of joint venture partnership between education and business – where the average tech scientist/engineer makes near to a quarter of a million dollars annually.

Silicon Valley is most notably home to modern companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Intel, Cisco, Adobe, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard.

At the core of this great place of ideas and innovation is Stanford University, which, especially in the early 1900s, relied on and simultaneously sustained the development of the economy of the United States.

A place where it is said that between one third and a half of all US venture capital funds are invested, Silicon Valley grew around and out of Stanford, with the school providing leadership for the development of the entire Silicon Valley area. Frederick Terman, often called the “father of Silicon Valley”, was a dean of engineering and provost at Stanford, and he encouraged faculty and graduates to form their own businesses, instead of looking merely for jobs once they had graduated. He was not pleased that Stanford graduates had to leave California and head back to the East Coast to look for work.

So, the university gave opportunities to its graduates to start their companies and launch their innovative ideas by leasing to them university land and providing them with venture capital funding to open shop in what would become one of the greatest office parks of the 20th and 21st centuries, Stanford Research Park (formerly Stanford Industrial Park). Terman knew that building and perfecting the connection between the inquiry of education and the process of industry was paramount to the success of Silicon Valley, so this strategy remained central to the economic and developmental progress of the entire region even through today.

In comparison to Silicon Valley, the scholars and the entrepreneurs it continues to produce and maintain, and the support it offered to its people from the very beginning, what is the mindset that Bahamians have about progress, and what is the path created for them to achieve economic prosperity?

Sometimes I look around at the possibilities for economic success in this country and I wonder exactly what it was we were trying to achieve (other than majority rule) since we became an independent country. Shouldn’t our desire to be an independent nation have been driven by a desire to be an advancing nation? And if we are to believe that that was the intention, and that somewhere along the way we lost sight of the goal, then what was it that happened to cause that loss of vision?

Did someone or something take away the spirit of progress, or did they have the wrong idea of progress to begin with?

Every morning I drive my mother to work, we take short-cuts through areas which are obviously depressed and lacking. We pass by able-bodied, young women (some with full uteruses) and men who seem quite content to stand on the corner like they’re waiting for something good to fall from the sky. They’re smoking, drinking in the middle of the morning or sitting on a rock eating breakfast out of a Styrofoam container, in front of a large area of garbage that has obviously been there for months and which they will no doubt add to once they’re done with the breakfast they’re eating.

I wonder about the level of conversation they’re having. Are they encouraging one another, or are they holding one another back to share in their respective miseries? If they can’t see the filth piling up behind them or won’t take the initiative to clean it up, should we be convinced that they have pride in themselves and want to clean it up, as a first step out of misery? If they have no pride on their own doorsteps, why would they, how could they have pride in anything else? And how could their present path lead them to economic prosperity?

Are they loitering in nothingness because they’re tired of fighting, or are they just too lazy to care? What kinds of thoughts are they having about tomorrow? What are they looking forward to? Is there anything for them to look forward to?

Maybe our country hasn’t just failed to provide economic opportunity; maybe it has failed to inculcate an understanding amongst the people of why economic opportunity is relevant, beyond the dollars it provides in a pocket.

If we have moved and continue to move through everyday life in the Bahamas thinking all that we need are jobs to pay our bills and buy us nice things, then we have already lost in our attempts to be a productive nation.

What do you see? Does our culture, our way of thinking dictate anything else?

As we suffer now from growing poverty and an ailing economy, what are the answers to get us out of this hellhole? The poverty and deficiency that consumes Bahamians now, would it have had the same stranglehold if, 40 to 50 years ago, there was a real investment in the mindset of the people and in the way they were taught to regard their lives and the future?

If all we want are jobs to pay our bills and buy us nice things then relying on people outside of the country to bring money to the country for bills and nice things may work in the short-term. I suppose it did.

Except it is not, nor has it ever been, sustainable. And the short-term is clearly over and done with.

For decades, we have been told to go to school, get a job, get into debt to buy a house, have a family, and retire on a minimum pension. And because this was the extent of our forethought and our view of our place in the world, this is why we are exactly where we find ourselves today – trying to figure out how to dig ourselves out of this hole we’re in, how to create or, in the case of agricultural enterprise, recreate industry, how to give people the tools they need to not just succeed but to thrive. And if we’re only now trying to determine this, then what was the original plan?

Our economic failures are ultimately a result of a lack of vision and the breeding of generations of people who are programmed to operate within a vacuum, looking only far enough to the outside for funding and a fix of our internal problems, while no truly successful mechanisms have been in place in 40 years, to ensure that Bahamians can be independently successful over the long-term.

Creating and innovating is what drives, improves, sustains, and grows an economy. Without these things we are a vehicle idle in park. But you have to teach this way of thinking.

Many students don’t do well in school because, to them, learning is imposed as an obligation. There is limited matching of skill sets to learning. The students don’t make the connection between education, ambition, opportunity, dream fulfilment and a better world, because they’re wired to achieve just enough to get hired for a job.

It’s a very difficult mindset to break away from, especially when surrounded by depressive conditions and few opportunities; I’ve only recently become inspired and confident enough to dismiss all the misconceptions surrounding the definition of success and take the full chance myself, but I suspect that probably has more to do now with desperation than inspiration.

Bahamian children are not, on average, raised in an environment to achieve great things through their own creativities, with a greater motivating factor being to impact upon their country and the entire world in a way that makes life better for all human beings.

So, when anyone stands back and looks at the people of this country many decades from now, and they view them through the eyes of history, what will they see?

When the Bahamas ends up in a world, Caribbean, or North American history book, for civilizations centuries from now to read about, what will be the story they learn about us?

Who will they say we were?

What motivated us?

What did we believe in, and where did it get us?

Who conquered us? And why were we conquerable?

What great contributions did we make to humanity?

If we can’t rise today to the challenges these questions raise against us, we will not rise at all.

• Share your thoughts online at tribune242.com, via email at Coleloquial@Gmail.com, or on Facebook and Twitter using the handle @Coleloquial.