Former Apple Exec Says Shenzhen Will Birth the Next Apple
A former Apple executive turned startup CEO argues that Shenzhen, not Silicon Valley, is the best place to build the next consumer electronics giant.
If you're dreaming of building the next Apple, you might want to book a flight to Shenzhen instead of San Francisco. That's the bold take from Will Wang, CEO of a Chinese smart-glasses startup and a former Apple executive who knows a thing or two about what it takes to build iconic consumer electronics.
Wang's argument isn't just contrarian for the sake of it. Shenzhen has quietly become one of the world's most impressive hardware ecosystems, with a dense concentration of component suppliers, manufacturers, and engineers all within arm's reach. For a startup trying to prototype and iterate on physical products fast, that kind of infrastructure is genuinely hard to beat — and Silicon Valley simply can't replicate it overnight.
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Silicon Valley still dominates when it comes to software, venture capital, and brand prestige, but consumer electronics is a different animal. Hardware startups live and die by their supply chains and manufacturing relationships, and Shenzhen has spent decades building exactly those advantages. Wang is essentially betting that proximity to the factory floor matters more than proximity to Sand Hill Road when your product needs to physically exist in someone's hands.
It's a provocative claim, especially coming from someone who worked inside the company that essentially defined modern consumer electronics. Whether smart glasses or some other wearable category ends up producing the "next Apple" remains to be seen, but Wang's perspective is a useful reminder that the geography of innovation isn't fixed — and that the next big thing in hardware might already be taking shape on the other side of the Pacific.
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