Silicon Valley has played an outsize role in shaping Bill Ford Jr.?s thinking about the future of the auto industry. Although he didn?t know it at the time, two experiences in recent years left signature impressions that would ultimately lead to this weekend?s shakeup at the Ford Motor Company.
The first came toward the end of his tenure as a member of the eBay board of directors, which gave Ford a vantage point into a business culture dramatically different than the one he understood in Detroit. As he watched companies like Tesla Motors and Google gain a foothold on the future, he grasped the magnitude of the changes legacy automakers needed to make to survive, including working with traditional competitors.
?The whole ?frenemy? thing in Silicon Valley, that was something very foreign to us,? he told an audience at a Ford Trends conference in September 2016. ?It was clear for us in the auto industry who your competitors were. Spending time in the Valley, it was a much more gray situation.? Ford?s 10-year tenure with eBay so impressed him that he brought the Ford Motor Company?s own board of directors to Silicon Valley for a visit in February 2016. During meetings with leaders from Bay Area companies, he realized one of the automaker?s board members, Jim Hackett, was already familiar with the sweeping cultural shift Ford wanted to inject into his own company.

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?We don?t have to cede that to anybody. Tesla, anybody. It?s our right to win there.? ? Jim Hackett, Ford CEO

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