Colour of enterprise

It8217;s final. A new survey has declared that whites are now in a minority in Silicon Valley. Pat Buchanan and his ilk will probably seize this statistic to give fresh momentum to their withering campaign, but it will come as no surprise to most observers. In post-industrialised America, with manufacturing industries having lost their economic supremacy to knowledge-based service sectors, Silicon Valley has become the symbolic site of the new American dream. If in centuries gone by, immigrants arrived from Europe on over-crowded ships with little qualification for material success other than ambition and grit, today their counterparts fly in from India and other parts of Asia armed with technospeak and a sheaf of specialised degrees. As Po Bronson, who has extensively researched software startups on the western coast, wrote recently: quot;Silicon Valley is sustained by the myth that you can come here from anywhere with sheer smarts and a firm handshake and make good.quot;

It is a myth that found its first icon in twentysomething Sabeer Bhatia a few years ago when he fetched 400 million from Microsoft for Hotmail, a free Internet service that connects most Netizens. It8217;s a sign of the times that to make the headlines just a couple of years later the transactions have to be in billions. Like the sale of Smart Modular Technologies SMART, nurtured by the husband-wife team of Ajay Shah and Lata Krishnan for 2 billion dollars last year. Like the acquisition of another Indian backed company Cerent by Cisco Systems for 6.9 billion just a few months before.

No wonder then that the 300,000-strong techie community in the United States is growing at a rate far in excess of other demographic increases in that country. No wonder the American Dream is beckoning the brainy best in Indian universities. In his travelogue An Empire Wilderness: Travels in America8217;s Future, Robert D. Kaplan quotes estimates indicating that 15,000 of India8217;s 50,000 information technology graduates migrate to the United States every year.

Passing judgment on this brain drain can easily drift into a never-ending debate, but Kaplan notes that countless businessmen and experts he spoke to during his excursion into urban pods inhabited by cosmopolitan professionals were unanimous on one thing: 8220;It is far more cost-efficient to import the rest of the world8217;s talent than to train citizens at home.8221; It is a theme, he says, that is explored in a forthcoming book by an expert from the University of Toronto on 8220;how the North American economy is stripping the developing world of many of its most talented citizens.8221; If this merits urgent focus by developing nations, it makes the path ahead for policy-makers in the US equally tricky.

Whites may be heading towards minority status in prosperous urban centres, but this does not indicate racial integration. It is the Asians and the Latinos who seem to be benefitting from post-industrial economic resurgence, not the blacks who, Kaplan says, are being re-ghettoised. Enterprise, it seems, still has a colour.