In Silicon Valley, success has many faces. Angel investors, lawyers, and aspiring engineers are just a few of the contributors to the industry’s diverse ecosystem.

“I think it’s really cool how Silicon Valley seems to be a hub for so much innovation. It attracts all this talent into one place. The amount of startups and new technology that have come out of Silicon Valley is really inspiring,” said Sanvi Adusumilli, a senior at Carlmont and president of the Girls Who Code club.

Adusumilli plans to major in computer science when she attends college next year, and hopes to use it to have a tangible positive impact. Her computer science experience began in middle school as she steadily leveled up the languages and tools she could wield. Now, she is well-versed in languages ranging from Python to HTML to R.

As it has grown from a purely agricultural center to the home of important defense technology, semiconductor pioneers, dynamic startups, and immense amounts of capital, Silicon Valley’s local and global perception has skyrocketed.

For many like Adusumilli who aim toward a future in Silicon Valley, it can seem daunting to attempt to enter the multitrillion-dollar industry. However, while success in Silicon Valley is rarely straightforward, there are certain hallmarks of the industry culture that it helps to be aware of.

Preethy Padmanabhan, Vice President of Marketing at Bidgely, an AI-based energy efficiency company, has spent 24 years developing her career in Silicon Valley.

“I think success is a combination of growing and innovating — for me, I do very well when I’m able to combine growth, innovation, making an impact, and most importantly, having fun. All these together are what I believe is success in any particular thing I do,” Padmanabhan said.

Her desire to innovate and make an impact led her to Silicon Valley, where she believes the ecosystem is primed to realize such goals.

“Silicon Valley is a huge opportunity magnet. It’s a special place where people come to create new ideas, fail, learn new lessons, and then innovate and succeed again. The ability to grow and learn and not be penalized for making mistakes is something few places have replicated,” Padmanabhan said.

This key feature has been observed by many.

“The Silicon Valley innovation and startup model is rooted in a culture that cherishes an entrepreneurial mindset and big ideas but also openness, sharing, drive, achievement, and commitment. The model is based on a culture that prizes risk-taking and accepts failing…and takes persistence and hard work for granted. It is the combination of these cultural characteristics that is at the core of the Silicon Valley model,” according to a book by Dutch sociologist Peter Ester.

Those who are willing to take risks and push into the unknown are most likely to find success in Silicon Valley, where both established companies and the numerous startups constantly seek growth, technological, financial, cultural, and personal.

However, as Kristen Pezone, an in-house attorney for Intel Corporation, noted after her first few years in Silicon Valley, these characteristics can be toxic, too. For example, she has observed an emphasis on bragging rights derived from overworking, which glamorizes issues like sleeplessness and not having a work-life balance.

“In Silicon Valley, people talk about how much they work like it’s a badge of honor: ‘I pulled an all-nighter.’ It even carries into their extracurriculars: ‘I ran a marathon.’ Everything is competitive, everything is hard, and I don’t think it’s that way outside of the Bay Area. I think it’s a bubble and things get warped inside the bubble,” Pezone said.

She believes that this has been caused by an overflow of the drive needed to enter the industry. Especially in technical fields like engineering, she has seen that most people have gone to highly competitive schools and had to compete to attain their positions. Once they meet similar people in Silicon Valley, that part of their personality is constantly engaged, and that ambition begins to bleed into all areas of their lives.

Despite the heightened competition, others have observed more laid-back aspects of Silicon Valley culture.

“Depending on the company you go to, there is less bureaucracy,” said Vedanth Padmanabhan, Preethy Padmanabhan’s son and an aerospace engineering major at Purdue University. “It always exists, but there’s a culture built up that allows people to just work on things and not face hurdles with their work, which is really good, especially for my 20s.”

In general, Silicon Valley participants and observers alike note the immense ambition and drive needed to thrive in the area.

“Silicon Valley entrepreneurship at the aggregate level is a culture that emphasizes the need to think big, to launch disruptive technologies, to change the world, and to go for moonshots (projects that address a huge problem, propose a radical solution, and use breakthrough technology),” according to Ester.

Pezone never expected to end up where she is. At Intel, she defends employee rights with a particular focus on immigration and inclusion. As a lawyer, as opposed to an engineer or businessperson, she did not always plan to land in tech.

After an initial pivot from psychology to law and her graduation from law school, Pezone began working at law firms in the Bay Area, focusing on employment law. After a few years, however, she felt burned out and tired of lacking work-life balance.

“I was working 12-hour days, five or six days a week, pulling all-nighters at least once a month. I decided to make the move to be an in-house attorney, and at that point my husband and I were starting a family — my first daughter was born that year — so it was a good decision,” Pezone said.

Despite 10 years of experience in law, the switch to in-house was not an easy one.

“I started at a smaller, less reputable company, and after a couple of years, worked my way up to bigger companies with better reputations,” Pezone said. 

One of the first things she noticed when she made the switch to tech was the difference in company energy. While she later became aware of flaws with the model, chiefly glamorizing overwork, she remains optimistic about the overall environment. With 10 years at Intel, the longest she’s been at any company, now under her belt, Pezone feels that she has found and settled into her place in the industry.

“At Intel, we sell semiconductors. In law firms, the companies are selling lawyers’ time. Now, I work on building relationships with others to have strong, successful teams and create something new. I much prefer to collaborate in a way that was not modeled for me at law firms that were much more competitive and individual,” Pezone said.

This perception is echoed in Peter Ester’s advice to Europeans hoping to develop similar environments around their companies.

“Newcomers to the area can almost feel the vibe, the stream of positive energy blended with a can-do mentality. The open communication mode and the willingness to share ideas and innovations are among the most striking cultural traits of Silicon Valley,” Ester wrote.

This fluidity has also allowed Preethy Padmanabhan to pivot her career on numerous occasions. Padmanabhan describes herself as an influencer, leader, and investor, and she has taken on various roles from engineering to marketing to sales to advising to angel investing. She also hosts a podcast.

“It was very intentional for my journey to shift. When I was an engineer, I did well, but I felt that I would be more interested if I were involved in the business decisions and the company leadership. That’s why I made the shift into business roles. It also helped me realize that the growth path for a career is not linear. When somebody only stays in one function, they might not actually grow as fast as they could,” Padmanabhan said.

This belief isn’t just held by Padmanabhan. In Silicon Valley, job-switching is a major tactic and occurs more frequently than in many other places. The economic causes of the job-switching trend are explained in a study in “The Review of Economics and Statistics,” where intra-industry mobility rates in Silicon Valley were over 40% higher than the sample average. The authors of the study wrote that job-hopping is significant because it allows for talent reallocation toward superior firms. They noted that job-hopping and modularity are most common when similar firms are closely located, as in Silicon Valley.

Vedanth Padmanabhan attributed this frequency to cultural causes.

“People in Silicon Valley aren’t satisfied with mediocrity, and that has led to the fast-paced culture,” Vedanth Padmanabhan said.

Job-switching can also be used as a way to leave discriminatory or harmful environments in search of more equitable ones, according to a publication in “Gender and Society.”

However, people don’t just leave for the first company that will take them. Job-switching in Silicon Valley is typically strategic.

“When I made the choice to move to a startup, I typically looked at fast-growth startups that were already growing at 40-50% year over year. I also looked at the culture, the leadership, and what exciting technology areas were in place. For example, I moved from networking to cloud technology with my first startup at Nutanix, and then I moved from there to SaaS technologies in FreshWorks. Now, I’ve moved to climate technology,” Preethy Padmanabhan said.

As evidenced by Pezone and Preethy Padmanabhan, success in Silicon Valley is rarely linear. All kinds of people, connected by their desire to change the world — or at least their corner of it — find their way to the region, and even within it are able to continually change roles.

Preethy Padmanabhan believes that her ability to scale her career has been dependent on Silicon Valley’s unique qualities.

“It’s a combination of a pay-it-forward mentality and being risk tolerant,” Preethy Padmanabhan said.

Preethy Padmanabhan is an angel investor and serves on several companies’ boards. 

One of the hallmarks of the pay-it-forward mentality in Silicon Valley is the prevalence of accelerators, incubators, venture capital (VC), and angel investing. These are all ways that startups can finance their development and growth: accelerators provide startups with experts and tools to scale; incubators offer working spaces, training, and networks for promising startups to develop; venture capital firms pool investments to finance startups with high growth potential; and angel investors privately invest in startups. While all four exist globally, their growth was fueled by the emergence of such firms in Silicon Valley, and their sheer number in the area exceeds any other.

“Half of all U.S. venture capital is invested in Silicon Valley companies, more than all other U.S. regions combined. The Valley even attracts over 15% of total global VC funding. Between 2009 and 2014, VC firms invested over $31 billion in Silicon Valley companies,” according to research by Peter Ester.

Taking advantage of these resources is one way that many gain success in the industry. For example, companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, Reddit, Twitch, Stripe, and Scribd all developed through the same Silicon Valley-based accelerator.

Others have also researched the importance of venture capital and giving back in Silicon Valley.

“The idea that people with good ideas can be funded to start businesses, they don’t have to have money from their family or from the state, is a huge revolution, and the continuing reinvestment of capital that gets generated in the region into new ventures is one of the most significant features of the regional economy,” AnnaLee Saxenian, Silicon Valley researcher and former UC Berkeley dean, said in an interview for the Harvard Business Review. “You have people who have been here for 40 or 50 years who have seen wave after wave of technology and have continued to invest or work on boards. They have a depth and a breadth of talent here that’s really unparalleled in the world.”

Despite its transcendent image, the deep flaws within Silicon Valley should not be understated. A primary one is the lack of diversity and racial and gender equity.

“Discrimination is real. Both inherent and intentional biases are present. Some people have it easier based on the color of their skin or their gender,” Pezone said.

These biases are evident in the racial and gender makeup of tech companies and venture capital firms. In 2018, 18% of venture capitalists were women, 3% Black, and 1% Latino. $9 out of every $10 in VC money went to male-led startups. While there have been some improvements since, they have not been major, and some have even been rolled back.

In addition to issues of diversity within the industry, Silicon Valley has a negative effect on already oppressed populations in the region, such as the lower class, Black, and Latino people, who are less represented in the industry. Due to its outsized role in the Bay Area economy, and the way it draws in many people who hope to create the next big technology, Silicon Valley acts as a gentrifying force that increases housing demand, pushes housing and living prices up, and enables only the wealthiest to remain.

“The tech industry rooted in Silicon Valley has become the Bay Area’s economic engine, shaping land-use, housing, and transportation — deepening income inequality and feeding the epidemic of gentrification sweeping the region,” according to a publication in “Race, Poverty, and Environment.”

Even Ester, who appears in his writing to view Silicon Valley as highly aspirational, recognized in his book the discrepancies in its effects on different groups.

“Though the Valley is a prosperous region with the highest per-capita incomes in the U.S., it is also home to blatant social inequality: its wealth is very unevenly divided over the various population groups. African-Americans and Hispanics, in particular, are overrepresented among the less privileged segments. Income gaps are widening. The high-tech economy may be booming, but so are housing prices and the cost of living, squeezing the lower and middle class out of the Valley and out of San Francisco,” Ester wrote.

Regardless, there are ways to be a part of Silicon Valley and still emphasize these issues. Pezone, for example, works to protect immigrants and people from diverse backgrounds in both her work for Intel and her external volunteer efforts.

“I love what I do because I feel like I have an opportunity to make a difference. I also still do pro bono work and volunteer for Kids in Need of Defense, a non-profit that helps families that have been through the immigration family separation policies. So I still get to be involved in the community and support things that are close to my heart,” Pezone said.

In addition to fostering innovation, flexibility, and community, Silicon Valley is a hub for capital. For those seeking higher incomes, Silicon Valley is a strong place to look. Profits from the industry make up a large share of tax revenue for the state of California. More than 40% of California’s personal income tax revenue comes from Bay Area tech employees. And this is expected to keep growing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, computer- and math-related careers are projected to grow by 12.9%, the second fastest of any occupational group.

As its capital continues to grow, Silicon Valley’s unique risk tolerance, fluidity, and network of supportive institutions are likely to continue.

“I absolutely believe that at its core, Silicon Valley will stay the same. Opportunities, the willingness to take risks, and the willingness to pay it forward, all that will continue,” Preethy Padmanabhan said.

Its struggles with equity, the non-financial kind, are likely to continue too, but the potential to surpass them may be higher in Silicon Valley than elsewhere.

“The ideal, at least, is that if you work hard enough and have a good idea, in Silicon Valley you can achieve it no matter who you are,” Adusumilli said.