254. How to build a tech ecosystem that lasts

What does it really take to build a tech ecosystem that endures — beyond PR launches and startup grants?

In this episode, Sophia Matveeva shares hard-won insights from working with governments, corporates, and investors on the frontlines of global digital transformation.

Whether you’re funding innovation, designing policy, or building a product yourself, this is a must-listen.

You’ll learn what most ecosystem builders overlook, why non-technical founders are a critical (and underutilised) asset, and how trusted advisors — from lawyers to auditors — can unintentionally become blockers to progress.

Most importantly, you’ll hear how to fix it.

You will learn:

• Why traditional approaches to building tech ecosystems often fall short

• The critical role of non-technical founders in sustainable innovation

• Why advisors, lawyers, and accountants can be innovation blockers — and what to do about it

• The underestimated influence of government in market creation

• Four key traits shared by enduring tech ecosystems

Why Most Ecosystems Don’t Last

• Short-lived programs: Many government-funded accelerators or hubs launch with fanfare but dissolve within 2–5 years due to lack of traction or measurable ROI.
• Startup survival rates: Globally, over 90% of startups fail. If an ecosystem is judged by the success of its startups, the system often doesn’t perform well.
• Dependence on external funding: Many ecosystems are grant-reliant and don’t create self-sustaining capital or talent flywheels.
• No enduring institutions: Unlike Silicon Valley (Stanford, Sand Hill Road, Google), most ecosystems don’t produce lasting institutions that regenerate innovation cycles.

00:00 Building Sustainable Tech Ecosystems
10:13 The Role of Non-Technical Founders
16:54 The Importance of Tech Fluency

If you’re shaping innovation strategy — let’s talk.

Tech for Non-Techies works with governments, economic development agencies, and public–private partnerships to design innovation ecosystems that endure.

Book a call here or email [email protected] 

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Transcript

Sophia Matveeva (00:00.096)
Everyone wants to build the next Silicon Valley, but many attempts to build a tech ecosystem end up a disappointment. And in this episode, I'll show you why and what the smart ones do differently.

Sophia Matveeva (00:16.398)
Welcome to the Tech for our Techies podcast. I'm your host, tech entrepreneur, executive coach at Chicago Booth MBA, Sophia Matveyeva. My aim here is to help you have a great career in the digital age. In a time when even your coffee shop has an app, you simply have to speak tech. On this podcast, I share core technology concepts, help you relate them to business outcomes, and most importantly, share practical advice

on what you can do to become a digital leader today. If you want to a great career in the digital age, this podcast is for you. Hello, smart people. How are you today? For those of you who have never met me, I'm Sophia Matveva, the founder of Tech for Non-Techies and also Harvard Business Review contributor. So I have lectured at Oxford University and London Business School.

and worked with governments, investors and corporates to turn innovation ambition into real tech ecosystems. And in this episode, I'm going to show you exactly what it takes to build a tech ecosystem that doesn't just launch with a fancy event, but actually that lasts and has real value. So if you are working in a startup, you want to fund startups, or if you're a policymaker, especially if you're a policymaker, this lesson is for you because

anybody can fund a startup, but building a system that sustains innovation, that is much harder. Number one, let's talk about what most ecosystem builders get wrong. At first, and you would have seen this in whatever side of tech you're on, most ecosystems begin with technical education. There'll be coding schools, there'll be now AI schools, there'll be courses on cybersecurity. We've got the tech education here.

And then we've got startup financing. so that's brands, that's accelerators, that's also venture capital. And, you know, in many cases, especially in Europe, venture capital is actually really, really backed by the government. So we've got tech education and startup financing. And these are really important. I'm not going to dismiss that, but this is also incomplete because the group that is really overlooked and non-technical founders.

Sophia Matveeva (02:37.887)
And there are these misguided assumptions about non-technical founders is that, okay, you've got non-technical founders, those people need to be taught to code or they need to be matched up with a technical co-founder. And sometimes that's true, but often that is not the case. And so we need to really actually give non-technical founders something more because the reality is that many successful founders are not technical. And in fact, what they do bring is set as market knowledge, problem insight.

user empathy and commercial acumen and so on. And let me remind you that Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, is a non-technical founder who did not see his first computer until he was in his thirties. Right? So, clearly non-technical founders have a lot to offer. The second thing I want to tell you about is that having tech fluency is not the same thing as coding. So if you

don't have any tech fluency, you've got to learn some stuff, but you don't have to become a coder yourself. Non-technical founders, non-technical innovators, if you're in a corporate, you don't need to become an engineer, but you do need to understand product strategy, like what is product management? Do you know? You need to understand what user experience designers do, so you need to know UX fundamentals. You need to know how to use AI.

tools to create a prototype and test your assumptions. You also need to know that that actually happens. And you need to be able to do rapid testing because essentially all of these skills that I've just outlined, by the way, if you're interested in learning these skills, the YouTube channel and the podcast have lots and lots of free lessons on these specific skills. So if you get these skills, then you can move towards creating

your test products much, faster so you can create and test your assumptions much, much more quickly. And then that will bring you to market much more quickly. the thing is, so this is my third point here is that what I've just talked to you about is education for founders. And I've also talked to you about what tech ecosystem builders get wrong, where they basically miss non-technical founders. It's very founder focused.

Sophia Matveeva (05:00.589)
The thing is, to build an enduring tech ecosystem, it's not just about founders. You need to have people who are going to support the ecosystem. So you need investors, need lawyers, you need regulators, you need auditors. So you basically need professional services and you need regulators. And by experience, when you have professional services, say, let's say lawyers and accountants.

If they don't understand tech and they are in the tech ecosystem, they are going to be in a hindrance. So they're going to make things worse as opposed to making things better. So what you want as a tech ecosystem builder, you want to make sure that the advisors who are working in that ecosystem know how tech products get built. They need to also be tech fluid. Now, I am not saying that the law is in a tech ecosystem

need to be developers. Absolutely not. They would hate that. But they do need that kind of fluency that I was talking to you about earlier on. So they do need to understand what product strategy is, not because they're going to be running it. But if they are working for a founder, that founder is obsessed with their product strategy. So they need to understand what the founder is talking about. Okay, the lawyers themselves are not going to be creating AI-based prototypes.

but they do need to know what a prototype is, right? So all of these terms, all of these processes, they need to be understood by the lawyers, the regulators, and the auditors. for example, I recently taught a class called Tech for Lawyers at White in Case, and White in Case is one of the world's leading law firms. And my aim there was to help White in Case lawyers

understand their clients deeper. And this is the kind of thing that if you want to have an enduring tech ecosystem, you need to not only educate the founders, you also need to make sure that people who are supporting the tech ecosystem have that tech fluency itself as well. And also really, really importantly, you know, if you are policy makers and you're watching this, make sure that

Sophia Matveeva (07:22.851)
your teams, your bosses, basically anybody who can sign off on these investments also gets that education because you need tech fluency across the entire value chain, not just in the maker bubble, not just in the startup bubble. And so this is really what I've seen from tech ecosystems that work really well and tech ecosystems that don't. So for example, in

traditionally successful locations that have had traditional success and now they're adding tech to it. This is where we often see problems as opposed to places that really just grew up with the tech boom. So I'm going to have a quick contrast of Silicon Valley versus London. So in Silicon Valley, the lawyers are very tech fluid, right?

The accountants, everybody, because that's essentially like everybody kind of just breathes that tech air and the ecosystem there really grew up altogether. So the regulators, the advisors, the lawyers and the investors and the founders, they all kind of rose together. so I'm sure that it'll be actually quite difficult to find a person who's not tech fluid in Silicon Valley. Now you look at London.

London has been a finance hub for a very long time. London has been a very successful city before software was invented. It was a successful city hundreds of years ago. And so this kind of ecosystem is actually much harder to upgrade because when things are working well, when you've got lawyers working, I don't know, for oil companies, for example,

and they're raking it in, they're making millions and things are pretty good. And then somebody tells them, you need to get some tech fluency and you need to understand the product strategy. You know, it is understandable when people are going to think, you know what, I can't be bothered. That's totally understandable. But this is the problem with upgrading, upgrading a city or upgrading an ecosystem, kind of adding tech to it. Because when people already feel like things are pretty good,

Sophia Matveeva (09:43.698)
They can't necessarily be bothered to upgrade their skill sets and upgrade their mindset to make it better. So the aim, if you are a policymaker and you're watching this is basically to show the advisors, know, like to show the regulators, to show the people who are making the ecosystem why it's in their interest to learn more and to upgrade their skill sets. So number four, number four in this lesson.

What I have really seen is that there is this very underestimated role of government. What I mean by that is, when we think of tech ecosystems, kind of think, again, let's think of Silicon Valley, right? Like that's the start. So we think of Apple being built in a garage, know, Google coming out of Stanford. All of this is amazing, but it's all kind of very individual. What we actually forget

is that a lot of the innovations in our iPhones, a lot of innovations that made Silicon Valley what it is today, were actually originally funded by the US government. And if you want to learn more about this, I have an episode on this a few episodes ago, but essentially it's based on the work of economist Mariana Mazzucato, who's an economist at University College London.

who basically has studied the role of government in tech ecosystems and in basically funding and being the first market makers, the first entity that invests for the long term. essentially without long term and large government investment, real enduring tech ecosystems would not exist. So whilst I also celebrate the individual founders,

I mean, I am one, so obviously, and I'm not going to stop. Let's celebrate the founders and let's celebrate the investors, but let's not overlook governments because Mariana Mazzucato research shows that GPS, Siri, and many, many major innovations came from state-funded effort. So don't think of governments as just regulators.

Sophia Matveeva (12:06.174)
think of governments as market makers. And if you are a policy maker, then please think of yourself as a market maker, not as just somebody who is there to restrict, but somebody who is there to have vision and to create. Because ecosystem design is fundamentally a policy choice, not just a private sector outcome. And so the reason why I ended up finding out about this is, as an education provider, we are now working more and more with government.

and really working with policymakers who are building tech ecosystems. And from this, are seeing, okay, what works and what doesn't. So, you know, my company, which originally started as an education company, that's really what we sell. That's still what we do. But as we are working with policymakers for building tech ecosystems, we can now really see, what's working, what is it? And advise basically on what to do next. Okay. So let's...

learn this place. What do lasting ecosystems have in common? are four things. So number one is you have to have support for non-technical founders and the support has to be strategic, not sidelined. This means going beyond matching non-technical people to technical people or forcing them to learn to code. So for example, what we are doing in the Middle East is we are creating

courses and an alumni community and helping non-technical founders use their business expertise to bring their tech ideas to life at a really, really large level. Okay, so that's number one, support for non-technical founders. Number two, for an enduring tech ecosystem, you need to have advisors and stakeholders that are trained in product and tech fluency. And you know what, if they don't want to learn, then get some new ones.

Honestly, if you have policymakers or if you have advisors that are basically like, no, we are really good at doing what we do. We don't need to learn about how products are made. don't need to understand what, you know, how does AI use data. If they don't want to learn, then they should not be working on a tech ecosystem. Number three, when a tech ecosystem has government investment.

Sophia Matveeva (14:32.668)
And that government investment goes into funding programs or it funds grants or it funds venture capital. What does not work is just giving out money and hoping for the best. But another thing that really doesn't work is when you just have, basically governments are deciding what ventures to fund. That also doesn't work. So instead, what we've seen is

when programs or grants, when they measure deliverable outcomes, so not just participation statistics. for example, how many founders made a minimum viable product as a result of this program, or how many startups got their first customer as a result of this grant, or how many female founders managed to bring a product to market and get to a certain level of revenue. So this is the kind of...

These are the kinds of metrics that essentially a policymaker should be looking at for their programs, for their investments to really have measurable outcomes. That brings me to my fourth and last point. In an enduring ecosystem, you have visionary and consistent government investment. And yes, I government investment in terms of money, but also government investment in terms of time and effort.

Because the policymakers that we've worked with that actually do genuinely make a difference, they are not just handing out cash, but they are learning, they are studying, they're traveling, they're going to places to learn from what works. They are listening to their ecosystem, they're listening to the founders, they're listening to the rest of them. A lot of work goes into it. so governments, policymakers that actually have vision and essentially have the mandate

to create something really strategic and long-term, those are the people that create tech ecosystems that last. We've seen this in action in the Gulf from founders building MVPs in Bahrain to corporate innovation teams in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and government-backed digital up-skilling in Saudi Arabia. And the patterns are clear. Real capability building is what makes an ecosystem endure. So if you're designing a...

Sophia Matveeva (16:54.42)
program or funding a cohort or shaping innovation strategy, then obviously, let's talk. And also, if you enjoyed this episode, then I would love to hear from you. just press like if you're watching on YouTube or leave this podcast a rating and a review on Apple or on Spotify. I've been doing wonderful spend time with you today. Thank you very much for lending me your ears. Have a wonderful day and I shall be back with you next week. Ciao.