Welcome to the second episode of our Skydeck mini-series “Out of the Valley.” Today’s episode starts in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the late 2000s. The city looked nothing like Silicon Valley in those days. There were very few VC-backed startups and not much of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. It was what author and venture capitalist Alex Lazarow would define as a “frontier market”—a place where entrepreneurs face significant constraints on funding, infrastructure, and talent. A place where the Silicon Valley model of moving fast and breaking things—an early Mark Zuckerberg mantra—just doesn’t work. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s trendy to say that Silicon Valley is over—that this place and the philosophy that it became is past its apex, and all signs point to its impending collapse. That prophecy has become even more popular as the COVID-19 pandemic has made both the Valley’s products and its real estate prices seem ever more impractical. But if those dire predictions come true, it might not be because of inflated valuations. It could be because Silicon Valley has lost its monopoly on its superpower: Innovation.  In this episode of Skydeck, we’re kicking off a three-part series called “Out of the Valley.” It will focus on the work of Alex Lazarow (MBA 2010), a venture capitalist and author of the book, Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs from Delhi to Detroit Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley. Over these next few episodes, we’ll explore the ideas at the heart of Alex’s book, detailing how entrepreneurs and ecosystems across the globe are challenging the Silicon Valley model—and explaining what these global startups can teach their peers in the Valley. In this first episode, we’re going to examine why Silicon Valley is at risk of losing its startup crown and what that could mean for the future of innovation.

Earlier this year, as the coronavirus pandemic swept across the globe, the MBA Class of 2020 faced the daunting prospect of graduating into an economy battered by widespread shutdowns and hiring freezes. To offer some perspective, we reached out  to alumni who had confronted similar challenges—including the OPEC crisis, the Vietnam War, the Financial Crisis of 2008—and we asked them how they made it through those difficult times. And in this special edition of Skydeck Voices, they share their stories and their advice.

In the wake of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, Willie Woods (MBA 1993) was part of a group of HBS students who traveled to the city with their Competition and Strategy professor Michael Porter. The group thought it would be a good opportunity to take some of Porter’s ideas about what makes a nation competitive and apply those on a city level. Two organizations spun out of that experience: The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a nonprofit focused on improving urban economies, and ICV Partners, a Black-owned private equity firm focused on companies in the lower middle market. Willie Woods is cofounder, president, and managing director of ICV Partners, and in this episode of Skydeck, he talks to contributing host Chitra Nawbatt (GMP 6, 2009) about what it takes to make real change to the diversity of your organization.

In April of this year, Sanchali Pal launched Joro, an app that works like a fitbit for your carbon footprint. Joro assigns a carbon score to users’ credit card purchases and then connects users with offsets they can buy to mitigate their footprint. Part of Pal’s motivation for building Joro was that she wanted a tool that would not only allow her to better measure the impact of her lifestyle on climate change, but that would also give users a step-by-step path to make a difference in the face of what can seem like an overwhelming challenge. In this episode of Skydeck, associate editor Jen Flint talks to Pal about the pandemic’s impact on both her business and on global carbon emissions, and the insight it can offer us about tackling climate change.

  In mid-June, weeks after protests against racial injustice spread globally, the Leadership Now Project—founded in 2017 by HBS alumni to fix American democracy—released the Business for Racial Equity Pledge. Spearheaded by six Black HBS alumni, the pledge asks business leaders to promise that they will pursue anti-racist initiatives in the areas of policing reform; safe ballot access and civic participation; and economic inclusion.    Among the alumni authors of the pledge is Lisa Lewin (MBA 2003), a Leadership Now steering committee member, ed tech veteran, and current cofounder and managing partner of Ethical Ventures, a management consultancy dedicated to social enterprises. In its first month, the Business for Racial Equity Pledge was signed by more than 1,000 people—half of which are either CEOs or senior-level executives.   In this episode of Skydeck, Lewin speaks with contributor April White about the impetus behind the pledge, what success might look like, and why she remains optimistic that real change is possible.

Angela Ruggiero is cofounder and CEO of the market research firm the Sports Innovation Lab, and when we spoke in May, it was the week after the Bundesliga—Germany’s premier soccer league—began to play without fans in the stands. Outside, that is, of some cardboard facsimiles of fans that were purchased as part of a pandemic relief program.  It’s an imperfect—albeit necessary—set up for fans. And Ruggiero, who is a four-time women’s hockey Olympian and gold medalist, knows it’s also not an ideal situation for athletes, who feed off of a crowd’s energy.   But for the sports leagues and the related startups that can survive this transition period—and not all of them will—it could provide an opportunity to assess and invest in the kinds of infrastructure and tech upgrades, Ruggiero says, that will make live sports both safer and more engaging on the other side.

Artist and activist Madame Gandhi got her big break in the music industry when she was invited to join the group MIA on their world tour—which launched at the same time as her first semester at HBS began. She decided she could do both, which mostly meant going to class during the week and touring on the weekends. But there was one week in November when Gandhi had to fly back and forth between Boston and New York every day—she’d be in class until noon, then on a 2 o’clock flight back to LaGuardia in time for an evening show, then 5 am back at Logan, stopping only for a coffee at Spangler before rushing to class. That was also the week she had her first cold call. But somehow, she says, she made it to her EC year. By then she had a taste for touring and decided to use the privilege of her education to elevate feminine voices in the music industry. Gandhi has released two albums of her own since graduating from HBS and is working on her third. She is also a public speaker and a 2020 TED Fellow—work that, like her music, celebrates gender liberation. She talks to associate editor Jen Flint in this episode of Skydeck about what it’s like to be an artist, navigating a world without live performances, and working alone in quarantine.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting Era of Zoom has physically changed the way we work. But according to Rachel Greenwald (MBA 1993), some of the core tenets of interpersonal communication that were important in the office remain just as important in our new digital workspaces—we just need to adjust our techniques.  Greenwald is a matchmaker, New York Times-bestselling author, and a business communication consultant, and in this episode of Skydeck, she tells contributor April White about the parallels between the business world and the dating world, the important difference between talking and connecting, and why this crisis has already fundamentally changed the way we communicate.

Sheryl WuDunn (MBA 1986) is the author of several books with her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, most of which have focused on poverty in developing countries. But in the Pulitzer Prize-winning duo’s latest book,Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, they turn their lens on working-class communities in the United States—communities that have been decimated by job loss and drug addiction.   In this episode of Skydeck, contributor April White speaks to WuDunn about what led to the fragile economic conditions of blue-collar America, what solutions are being developed to address those issues, and how the current COVID-19 crisis has revealed how much the country depends on its working class.