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Mehran Gul

lines on the record: 39
first: 2025-07-25
most recent: 2025-07-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That is either holding back or promoting innovation in that context. And it's best to look at these examples as products of that environment.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there are examples like that out there. Japan is a huge one. Obviously, Russia is a huge one as well, but not just Russia. All of the former Soviet states. If we were having this conversation 30 years ago, regardless of your opinion about the Soviet Union, you would not question that this was a country that punched at the highest level globally when it comes to producing breakthrough technologies. They would have a space program. They would have subways that punched at the same level as the ones in the US. Other examples would be countries like Germany, for instance. Germany pioneered so many of the technologies that we see today like our jet engines, for instance, aviation in general. German innovation has gone off a cliff over the past 30 odd years. So I've argued against simplistic explanations and I've specifically argued against saying it's a function of wealth or it's a function of freedom in every environment there's a different set of factors at play.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In innovation. Kaifu Li would say that it's precisely because China has poverty that goes back generations, that people are willing to do anything to get their companies off the ground and get that slightest edge over their competitors that is going to make their company go big. And again, the idea that it's a product of wealth and freedom doesn't really sort of hold up when you consider the fact that when you think about countries like Norway, freer than America, richer than America, not quite as innovative, Japan, you know, fear than America, according to the World Freedom Index, you're not really seeing Japanese innovation has gone off a cliff over the past 20, 30 odd years. So I think there's a flip side that I wanted to discuss in this book, you know, the anti-case study, which is places that used to be innovative but are not anymore. And why is that the case?”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the conclusion that there's obviously a China sized hole in that argument, I don't think even the most ardent supporters of the Chinese tech ecosystem would consider it to be an entirely free environment. And certainly the origins of the Chinese tech economy, as recently as 25 years ago, at the turn of the century, and your Shenzhen was a fishing village. It's now the richest city in China in per capita terms. The origins, though, are in absolute squalor. So I think a lot of reasons that one group of people cite for a place being primed for innovation is precisely the thing that another group of people cite for that place having a crippling disadvantage.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had read a lot of books on innovation to prepare to write mine. And the one thing that I walked away with was don't try and come up with one big thesis that you pretend explains it all. Because it is not just a complex phenomena. It's something that looks so different in different places that you can't really try and capture why it works in one or two phrases. And the book that I'm arguing against in the conclusion is really Matt Ridley's book, How Innovation Works, which is probably the best known book about innovation in the world and, you know, how it happens and the mechanisms behind it. And his conclusion really in the book is that it's a product of two things. It's a product of freedom and it's a product of wealth. And in environments where you have a lot of freedom and a lot of wealth, you see more of this happening. And I mentioned”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“American moved to Canada meant Kat Jeffrey Hinton, who is originally British, moved to Canada, and also the third scientist over here would be Joshua Benjio, who is born in France, who is now the most highly cited computer scientist and the most highly cited academic in any scientific field who has been at the University of Montreal for over two decades. The fact that you could have in Canada, you could go against the grain and still not lose your career prospects completely had a lot to do with the fact that the AI revolution in terms of research when you started there.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the University of Alberta, this one scientist, Rich Sutton, who's also quoted in the book, he, in this research obscure research community at the edge of the subarctic, he turns that into the foremost place in the world to do AI in reinforcement learning, which is now emerging as one of the most promising ways to do machine learning to the extent that Rich Sutton is quoted in the book saying that he doesn't think that he thinks that there's an upper limit to how far neural networks can take us. And then for the future, it is really methods that scale with computing power that are going to determine more powerful AI application. And that's where reinforcement learning is going to come in. So I would say both for reinforcement learning and neural networks, the fact that Canada and Canadian institutions provided an environment where divergent ideas could be explored meant that Rich Sutton, who was originally a”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI researcher in the world, and his students are now found in the top tier research labs and AI companies everywhere in the world. And University of Toronto has a big role to play in this. The fact that the Canadian AI scene was a lot less hidebound by tradition had a lot to do with this as well. And it's not just a story that's limited to neural networks. Reinforcement learning, which is the third big method to do AI, this was also out of fashion for the longest time in machine learning. And Jeffrey Hinton himself was one of the people who thought that reinforcement learning didn't really have a future. And in his Turing Award lecture, he even said that DeepMind is the reduction ad absurdium of reinforcement learning, which he thought that was not a way of doing AI that worked very well. But then...”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That he wrote in 2013 in AlexNet, which was co authored with Ilya Satskeva, who then became the co-founder for OpenAI, that really laid the foundation for what we now see as the AI boom today. Every major AI application that you see, whether that is Tesla's self-driving cars or if it is ChatGPT or whether it is just basic image recognition in Facebook tagging, photo tagging, all of that comes from neural networks. Hinton had to contend with not being able to work for the bigger names in academia, like a Harvard or an MIT and work for much smaller places like Carnegie Mellon is very well regarded now, but when he started working over there, it was not as prestigious an institution as it is today. And it is for this conviction that he is now probably the most celebrated”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mines. And it's really the story of a handful of scientists, the most popular among them is Jeffrey Hinton, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Physics, who I interviewed for this book. And his story is basically him bouncing around computer science departments in the US and the UK for much of his career, not giving in to the temptation to just start working on conventional approaches to AI. And he sticks with his hunch that neural networks is going to be the thing that is going to be the thing the future of the discipline. And for that conviction, he has to go and take up a position at the University of Toronto, which is a well-regarded but not really top-tier AI research school. And he's arguing against people like Marvin Minsky, aware of the Turing Award, probably the 20th century's biggest AI star. And it was really the paper.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So a lot of people might not realize that the contemporary boom that we see in AI today can really be traced back to a couple of major breakthroughs in the underlying technology. When people talk about AI, they tend to think that it's one big thing, but you can sort of, generally speaking, classify AI as an umbrella term that covers three broad areas of technology. One is GoFi, which is the Goro-Fashion AI or symbolic approaches to AI, which operate in the same way as conventional computer programs would work. You have these flowcharts of decision making. If this happens, then that happens, hard coded into the system. Then you have this approach called neural next, which you are referring to, which is an approach to doing AI that has been around since the 1950s. But for the longest time, it was considered to be the unfashionable way of doing AI. It was not a pursuit that was considered to be suitable for CEOs.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instance, so much of the economy is in private hands that even if these companies do really well, they don't create sufficient repeat cycles of innovation because the employee base doesn't get richer and they can't go and start their own companies either. So there's more than just venture capital at play here when we talk about incentives for where capital gets allocated for innovation and the repeat cycles of innovation that we see in any geography.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quote from AJ Agarwal, who leads the creative destruction lab in Canada saying that in that way, new venture formation really works like a flower that releases its pollen. One thing becomes big and then exceeds things around it. And then there's also a problem of places like Europe and the Far East where you don't have corporations in these places, you have primarily private companies. I talk about Germany extensively in the book that they have, the Middle Stand, which is the corporate backbone of the entire country. And the problem with people often tend to think that big corporations are able and private companies, family companies are a better alternative, but a big benefit of corporations is that anyone can go and own corporate stock. And if you own stock in NVIDIA and it suddenly sort of like goes on a rocket ship, then you can go out and invest your money or start your own company as well. But in places like Germany, for example,”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discuss in the book is the idea of having the European equivalent of NASDAQ, for instance, which is a technology focused stock exchange where you have lower standards for listing so that companies can raise money from the public markets much earlier in their development cycle. There are other sort of differences as well. In the US, a typical sort of seed round company, 20% of the company will be owned by its own employees, whereas in Europe only 10% of the company would be owned by its own employees at the seed round. And the reason why this makes a big difference is usually the way big companies are formed or new innovative companies are formed is that one big company succeeds and then everyone who got rich off that company then goes off and starts their own companies. But if a smaller proportion of the company is owned by its own employee base, then you will see a lot fewer of these repeat cycles happen in the economy. I have the”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you hear in a lot of places is that the reason why we don't have funding for big companies is because, well, over here, the mindset is just different or the culture is just different. Or in America, you have this frontier mentality. In other countries, you have the Citral mentality. And America is more about exploring the new, whereas places like Europe are more about preserving the old. And it's these kind of cultural differences that prevent better entrepreneurial outcomes in cases like Europe. And I really argue against a purely cultural explanation for these outcomes as well in the book, but I say that there are other things at play as well. Just to give you a couple of examples, the US benefits enormously from the fact that it has basically two main exchanges on an entire half of a continent, whereas in Europe you have 41 different exchanges. So the risk capital is dispersed among a lot of competing centers. And one big idea that I discussed.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That private funding skews innovation outcomes too much in the direction of what might be commercially useful now versus in the interests of long-term fundamental research. I think that story is different in different parts of the world. Like the US might be very heavily funded by purely private LPs, but other parts of the world, the state plays a very big role in the venture industry. Also, I think in the book, I also argue against a little bit of what you're talking about in terms of”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think in terms of VC funding, it is looking a little bit different in different parts of the world where I think the argument that VC funding is making the direction in which innovation is going fundamentally determined by commercial interests, that has an asterisk attached to it because if you look at Europe, for instance, a lot of funding for VC funds over there comes from what's called the EIF, the European Innovation Fund. And that money has all sorts of public concerns attached to it. And I think that kind of changes incentives in different countries for how VCs operate. Also, if you look at, for instance, Singapore as well, the government is a very big LP in a lot of VC funds as well. So I think the idea that”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If they have Google, we have Baidu, if they have Uber, we have DD. But very soon that transform to things like TikTok, for instance, or WeChat, and then the debate became about how.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their Chinese backed, or they were started by Chinese immigrants. And it's not as if Amazon did not try. They did try. A number of other Western e-commerce platforms did try to enter these markets as well. But largely, even in South Korea, for instance, Kupang won over Amazon. So I think initially, Western companies, Western capital, it seemed as if they would corner the market simply because of the volumes of money they were throwing at the problem, but I think eventually the local players do seem to have won out that one. And I think your second question was around whether they are creating their own innovations. I think over here, somebody like Kaifuli's example would be the first they imitate and then they innovate. And I've seen this entire trajectory with China in the time that I wrote this book. When I first writing this book, people said China can only imitate Western products.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just simply because they have a better understanding of local conditions. And you saw that with Uber wrapping up its operations in China and selling them to DD Chuxing, for instance. You also saw that with Uber, for instance, which Uber is probably the most aggressive company when it comes to international expansion of the current crop of companies. And the fact that even Uber's cutthroat culture could not survive in China gives you a sense of what the local culture when it comes to tech is like. And then even when you look much wider in Malaysia, for instance, Uber could not compete over there IDA and have to sell its operations to Grab, for instance. None of the big Western e-commerce platforms are big in places like the ASEAN, for instance. All top three e-commerce websites in ASEAN, whether that is shoppy or it's Lazada, they're either Chinese owned or”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, two separate questions are right. One is the influx of American capital and American companies in these emerging markets and whether that is creating an economy that is entirely captured by foreign money and foreign players. So that is one part of this. And the other one is whether this is simply creating copycat companies or whether they are genuinely innovative examples out there. So taking the first one, I think in the initial years, this could have been something that could have been characterized as foreign money and coming in in such vast quantities that local players simply cannot compete with somebody who's backed by a billion dollar or two billion dollars provided by Uber, for instance. But I think now if you look at examples in China or even further out in Singapore and in Malaysia, the foreign players are generally speaking being beaten back by the local startups, even though they might be less”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chinese bureaucracy starts moving in the opposite direction. Entire industries can go up in flames almost overnight. And I discussed the example of the gaming industry in the book, which Tencent, for instance, lost two-thirds of its market value within months. I mentioned the example of the crypto industry, which went up in flames in China. I mentioned the examples of the education industry, edtech industry, which sank overnight in China as well. So I think between competition and the government kind of supporting the industries, you're seeing examples of both in each country. And if you're a policymaker trying to mix and match, I think it's too simplistic to say that China is just state-sponsored entrepreneurship or Singapore is just state-sponsored entrepreneurship. You can find examples of the state being a benefactor, but you can also find examples of state being a”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Competition to something that looks more like what we see in the valley, even if Kaifuli would see that as people going soft and complacent, but you don't want to have an economic system where there's a permanent state of this almost Darwinian competition, you're in the tech industry. So returns being what they are, you do want a tech industry which Kaifuli would call soft because that is what works better for the society. But again, as with Singapore in China as well, you see both models where on the one hand the state is coddling a lot of companies by providing them with enormous incentives. I mentioned the example of the automotive industry in China benefiting from $125 billion worth in terms of loans and subsidies. But at the same time, you do also see the state promoting this Darwinian competition, but also at times when the wheels of the Chinese”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're seeing examples of both in the book. So, for instance, in China, we are seeing examples of competition may be taken to a level which would be seen as being perhaps too extreme even within the cradle of where capitalism first emerged, where Kaifuli, for instance, in his book really valorizes a culture of what he calls entrepreneurial gladiators, which are coming up in an environment where you either kill or be killed. And drawing a contrast between that and this very liberal arts sentiment that has become prevalent in American tech companies. Now, where do I fall in terms of my own preference? I do think that as companies evolve, they should evolve in the direction away from 996 and this gladiatorial.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He really could have been anywhere, but GovTech is the place where he thought that he could best use his energies. And we don't really see that many government agencies in the world that can attract that level of talent. So for that reason, I thought government in Singapore, there are good ways to intervene, but there are also bad ways to intervene in your tech sector as well. And Singapore presents a pretty compelling example and a case study for both.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have internal capabilities, IT capabilities that are at the same level as the Singapore government. So the Singapore government has something called GovTech, which is kind of like a Google within the Singapore government. And while most governments in the world, especially the US, tend to subcontract their technology projects to private companies, whether it is in the defense industry or even sort of very mundane municipal issues. This is not how things are done in Singapore where they have a very strong emphasis on building all these capabilities in-house, in GovTech. And GovTech has over time become a pretty strong template for what a government agency that is technically capable could look like in the book I include an interview with Hong Ki Lee, who is the director for smart projects at GovTech. He has two degrees from MIT. He worked at Google before he went back to Singapore. He is the grandson of the country's founder.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's an entire generation of grant entrepreneurs in Singapore, entrepreneurs who go from grant to grant, where if state funding was not there, these companies simply would not survive, which according to research done by NUS, startups in Singapore have a much higher chance of survival than companies in the US or the UK, which to an untrained eye might seem as though this is evidence that people in Singapore are better entrepreneurs or better technologists than anywhere else in the world. But if you look at it more deeply, it is actually evidence that bad ideas are being kept live longer than necessary, which is prolonging time to failure and preventing people from learning from their mistakes and re-entering the market with better and more viable ideas. But Singapore is also interesting in another way as well, which is I have not really seen a lot of governments that”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Singapore is interesting for two reasons. The first one is state intervention in every aspect of a person's life, whether which would seem completely out of place in the Western context. Everything from where a person lives to whether they can spit in public, these are laws that are actively enforced still in Singapore. And this sort of alacrity for involvement of the state in every minute detail of a person's life has carried forward into the creation of the tech economy as well. And in good ways, in bad ways as well, in good ways in the sense that the Singapore government is now one of the most generous benefactors of startups anywhere in the world, there was barely any company that I spoke to in Singapore which had not in some way gotten money from the state to get started. But some argue that this has actually gone too far.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The debate in Korea really is you're not really seeing any big new Korean names. You can probably name older generations of Korean companies like Samsung, for instance, Hyundai, but you probably can't name any new companies in South Korea. And that's because there's such a strong link between the state and the older companies that they think that the space for newer companies to arise just simply doesn't exist.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Founding chairman of Samsung that government and industry are like husband and wife. And it was really on the backs of these state contracts and state subsidies that these giant conglomerates in Samsung's called the Chai Bowles, which literally means money clique because they're all centered around specific families. These companies came up. If you simply add up the revenues of the top 10 Chi Bulls in Korea, that could make up the 10th largest economy in the world. And now there are questions about whether these companies are holding back innovation or whether they're actually helping innovation. This is a through line through the entire book as well, which is it's not just about startups. There are big companies in all countries as well. The established economic system is that helping innovation or is that holding it back? And that's the big debate in South Korea as well. So it came about through active state intervention, but now”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is also another sort of case study of people tend to think that entrepreneurship and high-tech entrepreneurship in specific, there's something very individualistic about it. There is something very anti-hierarchical about it. There is something very anti-establishment about it. But in most countries, when you scratch beneath the surface, most of these industries came about through a very strong partnership with the state, whether that is Silicon Valley, it was true over there, whether that is China, it's true over there, and whether that is South Korea, the case that you're mentioning just now. Even over there, as far back as the 1960s, these companies like Samsung, for instance, which is the 13th largest company in the world and the face of corporate Korea abroad, it came about as a direct consequence of the partnership between the company's founding chair and the military dictatorship that led Korea from the 1960s onwards. There's a very famous quote by the”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could be significantly blunted using venture capital was a very big part of that story as well. So I would say defense contracts, non-compete clauses, and then venture capital were three of the main sort of plot lines into what made the value what it is today”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work of Dr. Annelie Saxanian, who has written perhaps the most comprehensive history of the valley, that out in the east you had a cluster, an industrial cluster, whereas in the west you had a network where everything was a lot more connected up than it was up in the east. And that's what made all the difference with companies seeping ideas and talent much more freely into their environment than perhaps anywhere else in the world. And then there were other things such as the advent of venture capital, which Sebastian Mallaby in the book calls the machine for manufacturing courage, where it's not just about the fact that you have risk capital that you can spend on your company. It's also the fact that if your company fails, the venture capitalist can simply reassign you to another company within their portfolio. So the fact that the risks involved in starting a new venture”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very much the norm that was there as recently as two decades ago. So this is not so much a deviation as it is a reversion to the mean. And the orange of the valley can be very sort of specifically be traced back to events that happened during the Second World War. And then after that, there are other things such as this minor kink in California's labor laws, which made it very hard to enforce non-compete clauses. Whereas on the out in the east, if you worked for IBM or if you worked for Raytheon, if you try to leave that company, you would not be able to work for anyone else for the next year or two years. But if you worked for the valley, you could leave your employer on a Friday and go work for the competitor on a Monday. And what this really meant was that ideas and talent were circulating much more freely in the environment in the valley than they were out on the East Coast. And I say this thing in the book that, and this is building on the”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are the ones who just think differently, the artist in a turtleneck holding his chin, it's really the story of very conventional people in suits and ties taking money from defense contracts and initially investing them in defense related research. That really was the origin of the valley. And there was maybe like 10 or 20 years where that story sort of took the back seat, but now we see that sort of emerging again with the tech community in general and Silicon Valley in specific in the past 10 years, certainly swinging more to the right, where there is a lot more comfort with right-wing policies and with working closely with the state, with companies like Anural, for instance, wearing their patriotism on their sleeve. People think that this is some sort of deviation from the norm when it comes to the valley and the tech community in the US.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in the book, I traced really the evolution of the valley, how did it really start from how did Stanford come about, which is a very personal story of somebody's child dying and then them starting a university in their memory. But for the longest time, for about 80 years, Stanford was not even a second tier school. It was a third year school. And really the catalyst to Stanford's transformation into the school that it is today was Frederick Terming, who a personality that I discuss in quite a lot of detail in the book itself, who was, he taught at Stanford, he was an expert in radio waves. He helped the Allied war effort during World War II. And it was really the partnership between the state and the defense establishment and Stanford that was forged in World War II that really kicked off what we see in the valley today as much as entrepreneurs in the valley today might think that they are the unconventional ones or they”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is AI. And the fact that DataBreaks is in the valley, Nvidia is in the valley, open AI is in the valley, Y combinator, and with all of its portfolio companies now heavily weighted towards AI companies, those are all in the valley and not just in the valley, concentrated in and around one neighborhood means that it's really too early to say that it's the end of either the valley or of the US when it comes to its relevance in tech.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cisco, the homelessness problem. So, people don't really feel safe over there to start their own companies and to run sort of the next generation of companies over there. But I sort of came out very heavily in favor of the argument that, no, I think it's too soon to call an end to the dominance of the valley in tech and the dominance of the US in tech as well. And over there, it was really an insight shared with me by the chairman of Alphabet. John Hennessy was also the president of Stanford for about 16 years, who said that the valley, you know, small innovations have always come from all over the place. There are big companies in the world like Nokia was outside the US. Ericsson was outside the US. Nortill was outside the US. But really what the Valley specializes in is the killer app, that one big thing that defines an entire era, whether that is desktops or mobile or social networking. And that does not look like it's going anywhere. And that next killer app.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when it comes to the valley, really there were two big questions that I tried to address in that chapter. The first one was, is it really going to still be the valley going forward? And this is a question that has now been asked for some 20 odd years with predictions in everything from the New York Times to the economists saying that it's peak valley, the best days of the place are behind it. It's a perception that has been reinforced by the fact that Elon Musk doesn't live there anymore. Peter Thiel doesn't live there anymore. Alex Carp doesn't live there anymore. Keith Roboy doesn't live there anymore. So is the valley past its prime? And over there, there are arguments both for and against. The arguments for that that the valley is not the place to be anymore are ones that we would be familiar with right now. I quote Keith Raboy in the book, for instance, saying that the infrastructure is trekks to the limits. It's an ungovernable city. The issues with San Francisco's, the municipal issues in San Francisco.”
2025-07-25 · Intelligence Squared · Where Will the Next Tech Superpower Emerge? With Mehran Gul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT