Innovation is Downstream of Vibes
Silicon Valley has always been special. Those who got a taste of it firsthand, or those who have heard stories of the life on offer there, it leaves a certain allure. I’ve met many who visited once and just couldn’t get it out of their head. There’s a charm to the place. The people. The air. The spirit that just can’t be contained.
We often analyze what we feel. What is it about the valley that brings the allure? Is it the infrastructure? Is it the accelerators? Is it the network effects? Maybe. Those are all easy answers to arrive at because you can point at them. They’re all tangible.
But I’ve always wondered what we often miss seeing are the intangibles that make it a great place. If you look at the legendary founders that came out of the valley, the products and companies they built, they speak a different language. It’s almost as if they knew something others didn’t. I have always been fixated on that. Sure, you could replicate the buildings, infrastructure, accelerators, and so on anywhere else in the world if you were to manufacture another valley. It would probably succeed mildly too.
The harder parts are understanding and replicating the intangibles.
We love finding rational explanations for things, especially freaky things. Silicon Valley is a freak occurrence of nature. And freaky things don’t have rational explanations. They’re rooted in the vibes. Nothing extraordinary happens rationally. It happens because a collective group of people vibed with an idea, a thought, a concept the rest of us couldn’t see or understand yet.
Feelings over frameworks
Listening to actual founders talk about their early days is so telling, especially hearing their firsthand accounts. They don’t talk about frameworks. They talk about feelings. They talk about hunches and how they had an early sense of a vibe shift in an area they deeply thought about. They talk about the inevitability of that feeling and how it drove them to the point of putting all their energy behind it.
My favourite topic is technology history and looking back at the foundational years of the most pivotal pieces of tech we have with us today. The sheer ‘rawness’ of thoughts from the founders in those early days, the tenderness of the ideas and the care with which they described those… it’s a beautiful thing to watch.
Take some of my favorite examples. Instagram couldn’t have been born from a social media strategy deck. It came from Kevin Systrom obsessing over making photos beautiful because something about filtered, square photos just felt right in 2010.
YouTube? Three guys who thought it would be cool if people could easily share videos, back when that sounded completely ridiculous. But they kept going because it felt fun to explore.
The iPhone? Steve Jobs thought phones were ugly and stupid and decided to make one that wasn’t. No focus groups told him people desperately wanted to carry the internet in their pockets. It was pure curiosity about what a beautiful phone could become.
Every single one of these ideas sounded completely absurd to reasonable people at the time. But the founders could feel something shifting in the culture. More importantly, their environment didn’t force them to suppress the vibes they were feeling.
Here’s what happened next: once these companies succeeded, an entire industry of explainers emerged to tell us why they worked. Business schools wrote case studies. Consultants built frameworks. VCs created investment theses.
They took the feeling and turned it into bullet points.
The frameworks aren’t wrong, exactly. They’re just not causal. They’re what success looks like after you’ve already figured out the vibe. They’re the exhaust, not the engine.
We’ve been systematically trained to believe that innovation happens through process. Through structured thinking. Through frameworks and methodologies and best practices borrowed from people who’ve already won.
But here’s the thing: by the time we can justify a hunch with data, it’s not a hunch anymore. It’s consensus reality. And consensus reality rarely creates the kind of breakthrough that changes everything.
The ecosystem of Yes
The real challenge isn’t that other ecosystems lack the money or the talent. It’s very rare to see tangible bets placed on vibes and feelings outside of Silicon Valley, no matter how strong or foundational they are. Decades of being told that credible business requires documented justification have quietly trained us to dismiss the very intuitions that spark breakthrough thinking.
We’ve ended up with systems that systematically filter out vibe-based insights. Workplaces treat “I have a feeling about this” as insufficient reasoning. This happens naturally when we optimize for predictability over possibility.
Take India, where some of the world’s most sophisticated cultural intelligence lives alongside a business ecosystem built around borrowed playbooks. Brilliant minds who could potentially read societal shifts find themselves channeling that intuition into building “India’s Uber” or “India’s Netflix” instead of building something that could only emerge from an inherently Indian insight.
These can be good businesses, but they represent cultural arbitrage rather than cultural creation.
Innovation asks something most environments don’t encourage: the willingness to be wrong in ways that matter. Every transformative Valley founder has been spectacularly incorrect about their initial assumptions while being right about something deeper they couldn’t yet put into words.
Most cultures have trained this instinct away. Being wrong feels like failure rather than exploration. So we wait for someone else to prove the pattern before we follow it.
Silicon Valley stumbled into something rare: an ecosystem that says yes before it says how. VCs who’ve learned that the best opportunities sound impossible at first. Media that treats bold failures as more interesting than safe successes. A social fabric where attempting something ambitious and missing feels better than hitting a predictable target.
Beyond that, they’ve built permission for pure exploration. “This seems interesting, let’s see where it leads…” becomes a valid reason to spend months or years following a thread. True hacker culture, where curiosity about the unknown gets celebrated rather than questioned.
Most places ask you to know your destination before you begin the journey. Silicon Valley gives you permission to wander toward something you can barely glimpse, trusting that the wandering itself might reveal what you’re actually looking for.
The best founders there optimize for fascination over efficiency. They notice things shifting at the edges of culture and make career-defining bets not because they can prove where it leads, but because the exploration itself feels necessary.
They’ve learned to maximize insight by following hunches that can’t yet be explained.
The seeds don’t travel
Look around and you’ll see cities trying to recreate Silicon Valley’s magic. Singapore pours government money into innovation districts. London builds on its financial infrastructure. Tel Aviv leverages military talent. Bangalore doubles down on engineering depth.
But they’re focusing on the wrong things.
We can’t replicate Silicon Valley because we can’t replicate the cultural confidence to act on vibes. That confidence comes from decades of seeing vibe-based risks pay off, creating a flywheel where more people get permission to trust their hunches.
But it goes deeper than structural advantages. Silicon Valley isn’t just a place where people take risks on hunches. Being ahead of the entire world is the daily lived experience there. When your neighbor just built something that changed how billions of people communicate, and your other neighbor is working on something that might change how we travel, and your coffee shop conversations are about technologies that don’t exist yet but probably will next year… that creates a baseline confidence about what’s possible that you literally cannot manufacture elsewhere.
The people there don’t just read vibes. They’ve grown up watching vibes get turned into world-changing realities. They’ve seen the iPhone get invented down the street. They’ve watched Netflix kill Blockbuster from their backyard. They’ve witnessed Google organize the world’s information while they were in college.
This creates something extraordinary: an entire population that has the lived experience of being 5-10 years ahead of the rest of the world. Not just once, but over and over again. Not just in theory, but through neighbors and friends and colleagues.
You cannot teach this in school. You cannot practice this in accelerators. You have to be steeped in an environment that breathes this and lives this daily. The act of spotting the next big shift before anyone else isn’t just a skill. It’s muscle memory built over decades of watching it happen.
And then there’s the storytelling. Catching an early vibe is only the beginning. Being able to articulate that shift into words and stories that inspire extremely talented people to join you—that’s what makes things happen. Steve Jobs didn’t just realize the need for a better device. He convinced brilliant people around him to join the mission. Story matters as much as sensing the vibe in the first place.
This is the whole point: vibes, stories, narratives are intangible. They’re fleeting. You need true visionaries who capture them and pour all their creative energy into pushing them forward. You can’t manufacture this.
These seeds that make Silicon Valley what it is aren’t available to us because they’re cultural, not structural. They’re about having the collective experience of willing impossible futures into existence and watching them become everyone’s reality. Most importantly, they’re about living and breathing pure vibes—the permission to follow your curiosity into the ridiculous and unknown, just because it feels worth exploring.
Until our ecosystems develop this cultural muscle, until we start celebrating people who venture into the unplanned because it seems fun, until we reward freewheeling exploration without demanding to know the destination first, we’ll keep building better versions of yesterday’s innovations instead of creating tomorrow’s realities.
Innovation is downstream of vibes.