Communications of the ACM

WHAT IS IT about the residents of Silicon Valley that encourages risk taking? I have of- ten wondered about that and have reached an interesting, if possibly controversial conclusion. Thinking more generally about immigration, I considered my own family history. In the mid-late 1800s, my father’s family emigrated from the Alsace-Lorraine region (variously French and German) to Kentucky. A great many families came to the U.S. during that period. It is a family belief that my great-grandmother, born Caroline Reinbrecht, brought the idea of “ kindergarten” from Germany to her new home. My grandfather, Maximilian Cerf, was an engineer and inventor.

Many Silicon Valley residents are also
immigrants and their innovative talent
and willingness to take risks have been
abundantly demonstrated in the past
several decades. On the other hand,
we hear that risk taking and tolerance
for (business) failure is less common
in Europe despite the fact that many of
the successful Silicon Valley entrepre-
neurs (and the rest of the U.S.) are from
that region. This leads me to think that
emigrants are quintessential risk takers.
Moving to a new country and, potential-
ly, a new language and culture, surely in-
volves risk. To be sure, some emigrants,
especially those coming to America in
the 1600s, were fleeing persecution and
that has continued to be the case to this
day for a portion of those arriving here.
Their emigration was and is driven as
much by necessity as a willingness to
take risk. Those left behind were pre-
sumably less inclined to take risk and
have passed their genetic tendencies
to their descendants. Hence, the ste-
reotypic risk averseness of the European
population. I emphasize this is a stereo-
type that is plainly not universal and may
not even be credible.
Think, however, about the westward
movement of the 19th century. The fam-
ilies that moved to the American Mid-
west and the West were taking enor-
mous risks. The journey was arduous,
long, and made the more hazardous
by potential encounters with Native
American tribes that were understand-
ably resistant to what they saw as invad-
ers of their land. And yet, they came,
settled, raised their families, farmed,
ranched, started new businesses, and
contributed to the expansion of the
U.S. across North America.
So we come to a possible explana-
tion for this phenomenon. The emi-
grants brought with them a gene pool
that predisposed them to risk taking.
That this is not entirely preposterous,
is underscored by a 2009 article that
I encountered that speaks directly to
this topic.a The authors conclude:
“Results demonstrate that finan-
cial risk seeking is correlated with the
5-HTTLPR and DRD4 functional poly-
morphisms.”
I don’t pretend to grasp all the impli-
cations of that statement other than to
conclude there is evidence for a genetic
component to risk seeking (or at least
risk tolerant) behavior. We hear the
term “Yankee Ingenuity,” which was
a C.M. Kuhnen and J.Y. Chiao. Genetic deter-
minants of financial risk taking. PLOS ONE 4,

2 (Feb. 11, 2009), e4362, doi: 0.1371/journal.
pone.0004362
originally associated with emigrants
and settlers in the American Northeast
but has come to refer more generally
to a common stereotype of American
inventiveness. Someone making the
trek to the West, arriving where enter-
prises were scarce to nonexistent, had
to make do with whatever was at hand
or could be invented on the spot.
The 19th century was also the pe-
riod of the Industrial Revolution in
Europe, America, and elsewhere. The
term “revolution” is appropriate given
the extraordinary creativity of the pe-
riod. The steam engine, railroads, tele-
graph, telephone, electrical power gen-
eration, distribution and use, electrical
appliances including the famous light
bulb, were among the many, many
other inventions of that era. As we ap-
proach the end of the second decade
of the 21st century, we can look back at
the 20th and recognize a century of truly
amazing developments, especially the
transistor and the programmable com-
puters derived from it. While it would
be a vast overstatement to ascribe all
this innovation to genetic disposition,
it seems to me inarguable that much of
our profession was born in the fecund
minds of emigrants coming to America
and to the West over the past century.
I celebrate this phenomenon and
hope we can keep alive the daring of
entrepreneurs, teaching our children
to embrace risk, to tolerate failure and
to learn from it, regardless of their ge-
netic heritage.