Is there a code for innovation? Sandboxer Bjoern Herrmann and his team at Blackbox, a new seed accelerator, want to know. In their attempt to answer this fascinating question, they have launched the Startup Genome Project to explore the DNA of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley.

The financial crisis has left hundreds of millions of people jobless globally. Given the structural changes the global economy is going through more significant losses may be just around the corner.
To defend against this possibility, countries and large corporations all around the world are trying to copy the success of Silicon Valley. Millions of people travel to Silicon Valley every year to learn how entrepreneurship happens there. Russia recently invested billions to make Skolkovo the Russian Silicon Valley, Chile with Startup Chile, the UK with East London & many other attemps in Singapore, Berlin, Pune, Hong Kong, Seoul, etc.

The energy being invested to replicate Silicon Valley is so enormous because countries have recognized that innovation is the only long-term sustainable growth strategy. Many studies back this up, such as the one the Kauffman foundation released last year that showed all the job growth in the US comes from startups.

But so far none of these initiatives have been able to replicate how Silicon Valley makes startups successful because it is not yet understood how Silicon Valley turns out winner after winner as a 
repeatable process.

Blackbox, a Silicon Valley accelerator with a global focus, has started an initiative to crack the code that has made Silicon Valley the world’s primary source of innovation, so that the secret sauce can become a globally used recipe for innovation. Yesterday they have launched their foundational work as the Startup Genome Project and are offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to benchmark their startup and contribute information that will take the project to the next level.

Their work includes the ability to type startups, identify their developmental stage & and the metrics that matter, and a system to integrate the methodologies of many of the Valley’s leading thinkers such as Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Sean Ellis and Dave Mcclure. They have tested their approach with 50 startups in Silicon Valley and their early prototypes suggest significant improvements in focus, iteration speed, time to pivot and effective outreach to mentors & service providers.

To support Bjoern Herrmann and his team in their task, you can fill out the survey here. In exchange, Blackbox will send you a comparative analysis that shows you other startups that are similar to you and gives strategic recommendations on topics such as what metrics to track.

Conventionally Sandbox ambassadors are the lucky ones who write the blog posts about Sandbox events happening around the world. This time however we wanted to give you the inside perspective from two traveling sandboxers (Adbul Hakeem & Susan Su) from San Francisco, who made their way to India for our most recent meet-up’s in Bangalore!

Abdul’s Account:

“I was amazed at the energy and the distinct flavour of social responsibility in the room. Holding challenging fulltime jobs, each person was taking the extra time and initiative to make the community better!

I also had the honour of meeting Ms. Sarah Bishop, Fellowship director of Starting Bloc. Most attendees have enrolled in their fellowship program & will be traveling to various locations across the globe to learn about social entrepreneurship from world renowned experts. I have absolutely no doubt that this hub will be instrumental in redefining the space through their innovation, drive and sheer exuberance of youth!

I look forward to hearing more about their exploits and learning from them. Good luck everyone!”

Susan’s Account:

“While I’ve had a great time being a member of Sandbox for the past 3 years, an impromptu trip to Bangalore, as part of a greater stay in India, dazzled me with the real gem of the Sandbox experience – being able to travel to another Sandbox hub in a place far from, yet meeting like-minded strangers who instantly became mentors, teachers, and friends.

It was incredibly fun to meet diverse members that reflect the vibrancy of the culture around them. The event was a great inspiration for those of us from Silicon Valley, the so-called cradle of innovation, to discover the energy and intelligence that goes into building social projects and causes in particular. People like Akash, Nishant, Sanoch, Victoria, and others, left me feeling slightly embarrassed that I myself had not done more, but also thoughtful about how I could – and would – change that.

Finally, it was clear to see that for our hosts Achyutha Sharma and Vallabha Rao the event was a real labour of love and inspiration, it was the finishing touch to my Sandbox weekend. Thank you – everyone – for joining and attending. For doing all the great things you do! I can’t wait catch up with you all again the next time.”

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The success of this event is another indicator that the new ‘Global Hubs’ format within Sandbox is developing in our key innovation clusters around the world. View some more pictures from the event here.

Sandboxer Max Hodak is a 21-year-old American/French dual citizen, currently getting a degree in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. Max previously started MyFit, a startup that developed analytical tools for university admissions which was backed by New Enterprise Associates. Fun fact: Max has been programming since the age of six!

1. Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation.

I’m back in school at Duke at the moment, finishing up an engineering degree.  I work in a neural engineering lab at Duke, too, which is honestly where most of my education happens.  I get to work with monkeys and neural interfaces for communicating directly with the brain.  It’s pretty cool technology.  I’m also working on some stuff of my own in the background right now, that hopefully you’ll be hearing more about in around a year’s time.

2. What are you doing and how did you get there?

Right now I spend Tuesday or Wednesday morning through Friday afternoon in North Carolina, at Duke trying to be a good student.  Friday night through Monday or Tuesday night I’m in Silicon Valley working on… other stuff.  After we sold MyFit last October I told myself that there was no way I was going to leave Silicon Valley to finish my degree — there was too much going on — but I really wanted to get back into brain-machine interfacing, and Duke is doing some of the best work in the world in that, and there was more I had to learn before starting something not in web.  So I figured this was a compromise that let me get both worlds.

3. Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

MyFit was both a success and a failure.  It gave me an incredible education and opened so many doors for me, but in many other ways we weren’t able to achieve at all what we wanted.  One of the first big lessons I got was that running a technology company is as much about human psychology as it is about technology, and coming from an engineering background, the magic to managing humans is something I’m still working hard at learning.

4. What do you want to achieve in a) the next week, b) the next year, c) the next 10 years?

Well, my goal for next week is to pass my midterm exams.  As for the next year, I’ll still scheduled to be a student next fall unfortunately so just getting through that is there.  That said, I have a lot of projects in flight right now and we’ll see where they take me.  I’ve never published a scientific paper before and I’m hoping to do that soon, too.

Ten years is way too far away to try and project.  One of the big lessons I’ve learned over the past few years is that we’re terrible at trying to either predict or intentionally shape the future.  If you want to end up somewhere specific, you probably aren’t going to hit it and you’re going to be disappointed.  On the other hand, if you focus on maximizing your exposure surface area and are flexible, you’re bound to end up somewhere interesting.  And of course in retrospect, the probability of ending up where you end up is 1.  That said, I’m staying in biotech and neural engineering now.  Internet is cool because there’s no barrier to entry, the culture is really fun, and both the extreme highs and lows come at you so ridiculously quickly, but ultimately it’s not as intrinsically interesting to me.

5. What was your most inspiring moment during the last two weeks?

Looking out the window of my plane as we were descending into Michigan last week, I saw the small towns below me and it strongly reminded me of what I saw in New Jersey as a teenager.  Down there, on School Street or Canal Pointe Boulevard or Ivy Lane or anywhere, there are all these normal people who work hard and are remarkably productive.  This country has such a high quality of life and it’s built on so much productive capacity.  What happened?  How did we get into a situation where the risk on our debt is monotonically increasing?  The view made me optimistic, if only for a moment, about the future of the country.

6. How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them?

So first, like I said, I’m very interested in meeting more Sandboxers and collaborating on ideas as they emerge — put in the same room with lots of other smart and motivated people and I’ll get tremendous value out of that even if I can’t see exactly what that looks like now.  More topically, though, there’s a revolution coming in biotech — the costs are rapidly dropping through the floor and knowledge is becoming widely available, like we saw in the Internet boom — and as tools become available things will become possible that no one would have believed even five years ago.  The community is absolutely tiny compared to where web in now, but the potential is there.  I’m definitely interested in meeting other Sandboxers in life sciences and syncing up with them on the future there.

Max’s favourites:

Movie: The Matrix
Place on earth: The Starbucks on 68th & Columbus in New York City
Quote: “Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.” – Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter

Here is the second blog post about Sandbox from Susan Su’s small series “Entrepreneur Lessons from outside the Valley“. Have a look at it! It’s well written and gives good insights into our business model. Also, if you are on Twitter, follow @susanfsu for a feminine point of view on life in the Silicon Valley.

Picture: Steph & Adam

She created a series called “Entrepreneur Lessons From Outside the Valley“, bringing ideas and best practice from outside into the Silicon Valley.

Click here to read the first post of the series about what makes a good networker.

Some exciting young startups such as Amazee (social collaboration), Procedural (3D city visualization), LiberoVision (3D soccer replays), Wuala (social online storage), Doodle (simple appointment planning), Newscred (digital newspaper), Zattoo (online TV), etc. will join the event from all over Switzerland and demo their product. Please drop us a line if you would like to join or maybe even have an idea / product to present. Looking forward to seeing you there!