Menlo Park Renaissance (Part 1)

When I first wrote the piece Silicon Valley: The Next Decade, I did not think that an opportunity to implement the ideas expressed in it would come so soon. Even as I wrote the follow-on piece, The Next European Renaissance, I had not yet started the subsequent discussions with the Menlo Park City Council. However, in just a few weeks, I find myself in a rather interesting place. The city of Menlo Park is in the midst of designing and planning a revival of its downtown and city center to prepare for the changes that are bound to come with the housing of the Facebook headquarters here. They are taking a serious interest in the kind of ideas I wrote about.

And that immensely positive experience, unexpected as it was, prompts me to write this new series that describes in more concrete terms what I envision as a perfectly achievable plan for a renaissance in Menlo Park. My thought partners in this are Dominique Trempont and the architect Bernardo Urquieta. On the city council side, we’ve had excellent interactions with Kelly Fergusson, Thomas Rogers, Katie Ferrick, and Vincent Bressler, among others.

Positioning

One thing I have learned in my years as an entrepreneur and consultant: Every product needs a positioning. The same is true for a city. What we have come up with for Menlo Park is a four-point positioning that encompasses the entire spectrum of work, life, and sustainability.

First, we want to see Menlo Park as the entrepreneurship capital of Silicon Valley. Because of Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park already has a natural strategic advantage with an intense concentration of venture capital in the city. However, today many young entrepreneurs are choosing to work in San Francisco’s SoMa district. Incubators are sprouting up in that area. Palo Alto still has a concentration of entrepreneurs, as does Mountain View, where Google acts as an “anchor corporation” for the city, and Y Combinator as an “anchor incubator.” However, the trend of young entrepreneurs preferring San Francisco over Silicon Valley is a real one.

Against that backdrop, if you layer in the fact that Facebook’s new Menlo Park campus will create a new and immensely powerful anchor corporation in the city, change is bound to come. How the city harnesses and leverages that change is up to us. Facebook’s upcoming IPO will most likely mint money for angel investors and entrepreneurs. This offers the opportunity for Menlo Park to proactively create a great environment in which they can live and work.

As such, downtown Menlo Park needs really cool live/work spaces – rental apartments, incubators, and plug-and-play lily pads – that can serve as a fitting creative cauldron. Perhaps in the same building there will be apartments on two floors and an incubator on another, so that entrepreneurs can live and work in the same building and hang out downstairs without having to worry about parking or commuting.

Better still, we want great culture, food, and entertainment to be available within the same downtown area.  All of it would be encased in chic, hip, elegant architecture.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Menlo Park Renaissance
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