Apple. Anthropic. Disney Research. Google. Meta. Microsoft. NVIDIA. OpenAI. Few places outside Silicon Valley can claim R&D hubs from all of these companies. Fewer still are concentrated in a city of just over 400,000 people—roughly half the size of San Francisco. Over the past two decades, however, many of the world’s most influential technology companies…
My company’s biggest breakthroughs came not from technology or capital, but from building a team rooted in ownership, curiosity and trust that competitors couldn’t copy.