A new of class of business pilgrim has been spotted among the internet campuses and low-rise industrial parks of Silicon Valley. “They’re pale, jet-lagged and dressed in black,” says one financier who has received gaggles of the visitors.
They are the itinerant company executives who come from the benighted analogue world, often as far away as Europe. They typically represent the media (including the FT) and communications companies most directly at risk from the rise of digital competition, though increasingly they also hail from a wider range of industries that fear technological disruption. They arrive with one thing in mind: to learn the digital secrets that have turned the area around San Francisco Bay into an innovation hotspot at a time when much of the established world is in a low-growth funk.
When finished, almost all attest to a heightened state of personal digital enlightenment. But according to Silicon Valley locals, the chances that anything of lasting value will come from these pilgrimages are slight.