Welcome to Edition #42 of Ask Gorick Anything. This AMA is part of Gorick's Newsletter, where Harvard career advisor and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Gorick Ng shares what they don't teach you in school about how to succeed in your career.
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→ Read time: 6 min
ASK GORICK ANYTHING
“How to be successful in San Francisco as an aspiring founder?”
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Subscriber’s question:
“I just moved to San Francisco (was at home/in school in the Midwest prior). It was a long-term dream to get here, so I'm not complaining, but I am also confused by the culture.
For example, I feel lucky to be working as a new grad here, and I foresee myself being a founder one day (for better or worse). Whenever I learn how people here built a really successful company, they either share advice that feels totally unrelatable or they reference words like “innovative” and “disruptive” 10x in 10x different contexts.
What would you suggest for someone trying to cut through this confusing advice to figure out what really works here?”
—Bea F. from San Francisco, CA
Gorick’s response:
Hi Bea,
Welcome to San Francisco! You've hit on one of the biggest challenges of moving here: people love to drop jargon that can make even simple stuff sound like calculus.
The word “innovation” is just a fancy way of saying “to find a different or better way to do something.” Don't let the buzzword intimidate you.
(Fun fact: I hate jargon. In fact, I hate it so much that I spent days building this workplace jargon dictionary.)
To answer your question, you need two things: (1) a practical strategy for your current job and (2) a clear model for thinking about how the world works.
1. How to be innovative in your work
In your role as a new grad, the quickest way to be seen as innovative is to focus on the four things every organization values:
- More customers, clients, or fans.
- Better products, services, or reviews.
- Faster ways of getting things done.
- Cheaper ways to keep everything running.
If you can find a way to help your team achieve one or more of these goals—even a small change to an internal process—you’re actively “innovating” in your job and boosting your promotability. (If you want further reading on this, check out Chapter 15 of my book, The Unspoken Rules.)
2. How to be innovative in Silicon Valley
For your long-term founder aspirations, it might be useful to recognize that even the most successful companies are usually just executing 1 of 8 repeatable strategies.
Here are the 8 ways Silicon Valley innovates:
1. Digitizing a manual or in-person process
Take something that you’d otherwise have to do by hand—and make it doable through a screen or over the internet, and you’ve got innovation.
E.g., DocuSign for signing documents, Salesforce for organizing customer information
2. Cutting the # of steps or intermediaries
Take a process that would have taken 10 steps and cut it down to 2, and you’ll also be innovating.
E.g., Calendly for meeting scheduling, PayPal for payments, Dropbox/Box/Google Drive/OneDrive for document upload, editing, and sharing
3. Making use of an underutilized asset
Find what’s sitting around not being used and make fuller use of it, and you’ll make an impact.
E.g., Airbnb for housing, Uber for cars
4. Putting a new skin on an existing product
Take something that’s old school or unappealing but otherwise useful, give it a new look, and you might just come up with the next big thing.
E.g., Robinhood for trading, Hims for prescription medicine
5. Making something easier to use
Take something that’s traditionally user unfriendly, make it friendlier, and you’ll be a star.
E.g., Zoom for video conferencing, TurboTax for tax filing, Shopify for selling stuff online
6. Applying a tool to a different use case
Take something that’s already being used in one domain and apply it to another domain and you might just uncover a big opportunity.
E.g., When Domino’s Pizza applied ecommerce technology to pizza orders, or how the AI technology behind LLMs like ChatGPT is now being applied to medicine, financial analysis, and other specific settings
7. Applying a proven model to a new location
The world is a big place, so if you see something exists in one place but not another, this could be your chance (as the founder of shopping malls in the Philippines discovered, or the founder of this nonprofit kitchen in Kenya that feeds 300,000 people per day).
E.g., Uber in the U.S. becoming DiDi in China, Ola in India, and Grab in Southeast Asia, or “challenger banks” like Starling Bank in the U.K., Chime in the U.S., N26 in Germany, and more
8. Being the backbone of other tech firms
There’s a popular saying in business: “Sell shovels during a gold rush.” Sell shovels in that rush, and you might just become the next NVIDIA. In other words, build the essential tools that everyone needs to participate in a booming market.
E.g., Amazon AWS for cloud computing infrastructure and servers, NVIDIA for GPU hardware/chips needed to train AI models, Stripe for online payment processing
Once you start looking at the world through the lens of these 8 levers, the jargon (hopefully) melts away. You'll see that every "disruptive" company is just executing one of these models… and you can, too.
Hope this helps you feel less confused and more empowered!
See you next Tuesday,
Gorick
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