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NashvilleINNOVATE™ Silicon Valley will tell a different story.
Rather than focusing only on the famous companies and founders, this book goes after the operating system beneath them — the people, relationships, institutions, capital, culture and places that have enabled one relatively small region to produce extraordinary innovation, decade after decade.
This is not another collection of company profiles. It is an attempt to document the “secret sauce” of Silicon Valley through the people who actually built, funded, advised, researched, connected and enabled it.
The big question
What needs to be true for an ecosystem to produce extraordinary innovation, again and again?
Editorial approach
The book will explore Silicon Valley through three lenses, carried through every chapter.
How universities, pioneering companies, investors, entrepreneurs and generations of innovators created the ecosystem — the decisions and moments that made today possible.
The people and organisations driving AI, semiconductors, software, biotech, medtech, space, defence, robotics, climate, energy, mobility and media — and the relationships connecting them.
What must happen for Silicon Valley to continue reinventing itself — and what other innovation ecosystems around the world can genuinely learn from it.
Archive & access
With access to historical material and imagery from the Computer History Museum, the book will connect Silicon Valley's extraordinary past with the people building its future — weaving archival storytelling through contemporary stories rather than treating history as a preface.
We do not want myth to overtake method.
Apple, Google, Meta, NVIDIA and OpenAI are important parts of the story. They are not the whole story.
The real Silicon Valley story includes the venture capitalists who take the early risks, the academics whose research escapes the laboratory, the engineers who quietly change industries, the serial entrepreneurs who recycle experience and capital, and the advisers, recruiters, mentors and connectors who form the invisible mesh of the ecosystem.
Even the places matter. Sand Hill Road, the universities and laboratories, and the restaurants, hotels and cafés where introductions were made, companies conceived and important deals began.
Approximately 30–40 invited thought leaders, together with carefully selected companies, founders, investors, academics and ecosystem builders, will create a collective portrait of how Silicon Valley actually works.
Proposed contents
Each chapter carries the Then / Now / Next structure, built from first-hand accounts rather than desk research.
The podcast
Selected contributors join us in the studio while the research is still happening.
Not to promote a finished chapter, but to think out loud about how this ecosystem actually works — the introductions that changed a trajectory, the places where deals began, the things everybody knows and nobody has written down.
Episodes release monthly from October 2026, paired with a dinner series that brings contributors into the same room. Much of what ends up in the book will start at those tables.
Sample stories
Three worked examples of the format — portrait, pull-quote and a short first-person account answering the book's ten questions.
The editorial framework
We are not looking for conventional corporate profiles. A common framework turns hundreds of individual stories into something more valuable: a collective piece of research into how innovation actually happens.
Production schedule
Nominations are open
We are not the right people to decide who matters in Silicon Valley. The ecosystem is.
Nominate someone whose contribution is real and under-recognised — the investor who went first, the researcher whose work escaped the lab, the connector everyone was introduced by. Self-nominations are welcome.
Every nomination is read by the editorial team. We follow up personally on the ones we pursue.
Ways to take part
This cannot be produced properly by a publisher working alone. It requires Silicon Valley itself.
Approximately 30–40 editorially invited voices who establish the intellectual foundation of the book.
Companies, founders, investors and institutions whose stories answer the book's central question.
A small number of organisations who make the project possible and are associated with it throughout.
Financial support will not determine editorial credibility. The objective is to produce the strongest book, not the largest collection of paying profiles.
Beyond the page
INNOVATE™ Silicon Valley is intended to become the new editorial template for the international INNOVATE™ series. The structured knowledge captured through these interviews extends beyond the printed page into a global knowledge base.
Knowledge from Silicon Valley connects with innovation communities represented in INNOVATE™ editions across 103 countries, enabling future discovery, research, introductions and ecosystem-to-ecosystem learning.
The book becomes the beautiful physical expression of a much larger body of knowledge.
About us
One of us has spent two decades documenting innovation ecosystems around the world. The other has spent his career in this one, building technology to map how people actually connect.
Standing in front of the Computer History Museum's map of the Valley — every famous name pinned to a patch of ground between Redwood City and San Jose — the obvious question was not who was on the map. It was what held them all together, and why nobody had properly written it down.
That question became this book.
Founder of Global Village Publishing and creator of the INNOVATE™ series, which has now mapped innovation ecosystems across more than 100 editions and 103 countries. Based in London, with production roots in South Africa, Sven has spent two decades building the editorial model this edition is built on — and Silicon Valley is the ecosystem the whole series has been working toward.
“Books are the new business card that people do not throw away.”
LinkedInBased in Palo Alto and founder of Meshi AI, where he builds agentic networks — systems that understand people's goals, expertise and relationships well enough to connect them meaningfully. His work on what he calls the Internet of People is the reason this edition is being built as a structured knowledge base and not only a book.
“AI is here to connect people better.”
LinkedInIf we are going to publish a book about the world's most influential innovation ecosystem, Silicon Valley should expect us to get it right.