[notahacker]

The Silicon Valley "success, scale, fail" process doesn't work in Silicon Valley either if you look at average long term returns to average VC investors, rather than all the positive side effects.

The difference is that the returns from successfully scaling up in SV make those successes glaringly obvious and desirable to emulate

Scaling up across 105 more villages, on the other hand, simply produces more anecdotes for the pitch deck for the next wave of funding, which will need a bigger amount (and face a greater chance of it being hampered by evidence of something, somewhere having gone wrong). Appropriate milestones and accurate measurement are as much a part of the problem as the solution. Imagine gauging the relative suitability of an early Pets.com and Amazon for follow on funding not from their sales, SV style, but by interns flying out to foreign lands to quiz villagers on how their purchases had improved their quality of life.