Golden Age & Startups - Can We Recreate Golden Ages?

If you want to know more about the creator of this project as well as projects like 1001 Writing Tips Project, 1001 Poems Project, 1001 Science Stories Project, 1001 Atomic Essays Project, and 1001 Startup Theses Project, go to the website of Abhimanyu Jha

---

Atomic Essay

Golden Ages & Startups - Can we recreate a golden age by studying it and finding the underlying driving principles?

---

This atomic essay is on an underlying similarity between what we call Golden Ages in History & startups/businesses.

And the question the essay asks and answers is: Is it possible to recreate a golden age by researching and finding the underlying driving principles that might have lead to the golden ages that we know about? And can studying business and startups help us get to those principals?

The world has devoted in recent times significant time & resources to study, find & apply the underlying principles/drivers that help the startup ecosystem - comprising of founders, investors, smart people, and capable local and national govts - create and build valuable startups.

Applying those learnings have helped us create new startups ecosystems providing a great benefit to entrepreneurs, specific countries, and humanity at large.

What about golden ages?

Often there have been times in history called ‘Golden Ages’. Times in different parts of the world when there is a tremendous and unusual flourishing of the arts or the sciences, trade or human prosperity, often some combination thereof. Humanity owes a lot to these Golden Ages, whether they happened in India or Italy, in China or Germany, in England or Iraq, in Mexico or Egypt.

In startups, in business, there are drivers that help you achieve your goals. Not everything is important, those few drivers are. The most important of these drivers you call the ‘North Star’. You need to identify these drivers and work on them, focus on them, if you want to succeed.

What would be the drivers of the Golden Ages? What would be the North Star? Can we analyze the different Golden Ages, bring together the disparate threads scattered across those eras, and find, with solid reasonings, the most probable drivers of those extraordinary times to which we are indebted forever? Mine the diamonds — the basic principles and algorithms that made those times happen — among the hundreds if not thousands of reasons and ideas that exist among the set of possibilities. Find the Kohinoor, the North Star, if one exists.

And then create an actual golden era, or eras if we are being ambitious, by applying those basic principles and algorithms, the Kohinoor that we have found.

Count me in if that’s why you are interested in the past.

One key similarity between startup ecosystems and golden ages makes me hopeful that this exercise may be possible: like startup ecosystems, golden ages have always been geographically concentrated.

If Silicon Valley, Bangalore and Haifa are cities/areas where startups have flourished like mushrooms in 21st century, it was ancient cities and ports like Delhi, Baghdad, London, and Venice which were the hub of the golden ages in different eras.

So if I have to make a guess, both startup ecosystems and golden ages are created by smart networks (intellectual as well as cultural and financial) giving rise to positive feedback loops by concentrating trade, entrepreneurship, wealth, and talent in a specific geographical area.

Of course history of a culture, era or country is a thousand times more complicated than the workings of a business or startup. Therefore to attempt the project of recreating golden ages would be a humongous work, and even that’s an understatement. And such a project, if ever successful and widely accepted, should easily win at least five if not twenty Nobel Prizes as long as it demonstrated its success by creating at least one new Golden Age.

But given the scale of the work and the magnitude of the impact, it’s worth a try.

---

Topics
History, Philosophy, Economics, Education, Politics, Governance, Society