Author Archives: Hervé Lebret

Who in tech still has the courage to publicly oppose Trump in Silicon Valley?

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In recent weeks or months, I have been discovering with amazement or embarrassment that many people in Silicon Valley have apparently turned their backs to support Trump’s policies in the United States. It’s quite impressive, even if it’s not as impressive as we think. I already addressed the topic in July 2024, at a time when I believed Kamala Harris would be elected president. It was titled Politics and Silicon Valley. And I indeed discovered that former Democrat “sympathizers” were turning to Republicans such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, or Marc Andreessen. Worse, it seems that even Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) or Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) were going in the same direction. After all, in Europe, we are never shocked that a boss is right-wing and the least favored are left-wing. Again, you can reread my post on the subject. In reality, Silicon Valley is so Democrat in its voting that it was perhaps difficult to position oneself otherwise, and today, people position themselves more openly. Votes are also evolving as illustrated here.

So I asked myself the question: who is opposing Trump today in tech and Silicon Valley?

I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were figures like Bill Gates and Michael Moritz:

– Bill Gates is a moderate and not active politically. But I quote him from Bill Gates says he’s surprised about his fellow billionaires’ rightward political shift: ‘I always thought of Silicon Valley as being left of center’ : “The fact that now there is a significant right-of-center group is a surprise to me.” while “incredible things happened because of sharing information on the internet,” social media has had major downfalls. “You see ills that I have to say I did not predict,” While Gates is by no means an open Trump supporter, he said he’d do his best to work with the president. “I will engage this administration just like I did the first Trump administration as best I can,” Gates told the NYT.

– Michael Moritz is less well known, but given that he funded Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, Apple, Cisco, and YouTube, we can appreciate what he has to say in Trump’s tech backers are ‘making a big mistake,’ Trump’s tech financiers and supporters were “making the same mistake as all powerful people who back authoritarians.” He wrote that wealthy financiers believe “they will be able to control Trump,” or else are committing “another cardinal error: deluding themselves that he will not do what he says or promises.” “That has not been the modus operandi of authoritarians over the centuries,”

Paul Graham, whom I respect, wrote an article on wokeness that deserves careful reading, but it’s not really an opposition to Trump; rather, it seeks to explain a movement. Please read The Origins of Wokeness. For example I’m not going to claim Trump’s second victory in 2024 was a referendum on wokeness; I think he won, as presidential candidates always do, because he was more charismatic; but voters’ disgust with wokeness must have helped. And “Trump and wokeness are cousins”.

Steve Blank is rather silent but I discovered that in 2020, that he resigned from a Department of Defense advisory board, protesting the Trump administration’s decision to oust most of his fellow board members and replace some of them with political loyalists with no defense or business experience. See here.

Who else? I’ve searched a bit in vain. My “heroes” are rather silent, but they always have been, so what can I conclude? Hopefully, some will wake up and dare to oppose them, whatever the cost…

PS: I found a little more, for example, Larry Page: “I intend to tell the president that we are with him and that we will help him in any way we can. If you can reform the tax code, reduce regulations and negotiate better trade agreements, the US technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever3, he would be quoted as saying by Andoidsis.

Roger McNamme is another investor: Well, everything about Trump seems like a payback, right? All these executives are giving a million dollars each. These are rounding spreads. This is money they find between the cushions of their living room couch. But, you know, this is essentially a precautionary payment. And in Musk’s case, the investment he made in Trump, which was a quarter of a billion dollars, or the investment he made in Twitter, which was about $44 billion, has paid off, obviously, many, many times over. I think Trump and Musk will eventually part ways. I don’t know Trump at all, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would support someone who competes on the same level as Musk. But we’ll see how it goes. See here.

And of course, yes, there is Reid Hoffman, the founder of Linkedin, “one of the tech bosses most fiercely opposed to Donald Trump and Elon Musk“. See here or there or again là.

PS2: April 15, 2025. On the day Harvard University rejects Donald Trump’s requests, I just read a few marvelous pages from the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Here they are:

There came a day when Herr Settembrini directly confronted his pupil, and so betrayed his own pedagogic uneasiness. “But in God’s name, my good engineer, he is just a stupid old man. What do you see in him? Can he do anything for you? It is beyond all reason. It would be clear enough — though not necessarily praiseworthy—if you were simply taking him into the bargain, if in seeking out his company you were seeking out that of his current sweetheart. But it is impossible not to notice that you pay almost more attention to him than to her. I implore you, help me understand this.”
Hans Castorp laughed. “By all means,” he said. “Agreed! The fact is, as we know—permit me to say—fine!” And he tried to ape Peeperkorn’s cultured gestures as well. “Yes, yes,” he said, and laughed again. “You find that stupid, Herr Settembrini, and certainly it is vague, which in your eyes is worse than stupid. Ah, stupidity. There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst. Hello! Why, I think I’ve just coined a phrase, a bon mot. How do you like it?”
“Very much. I cannot wait for your first collection of aphorisms. Perhaps there is still time, however, to ask you to take into account certain observations we have occasionally made concerning the misanthropic nature of paradoxes.”
“It shall be done, Herr Settembrini. Absolutely—shall be done. No, in this bon mot of mine, you do not see me in hot pursuit of paradoxes. I was merely trying to point out the great difficulty one has in defining ‘stupidity’ and ‘cleverness.’ It is so hard to keep them separate, they are so intertwined. I know very well how you hate any sort of mystical guazzabuglio and are a man who believes in values and judgments—value judgments—and I quite agree with you. But the issue of ‘stupidity’ and ‘cleverness’ is at times a complete mystery, and it must be permissible to concern oneself with mysteries, always presuming it is an honest attempt to get to the bottom of them, if possible. Let me ask you this question: Can you deny that he has us all in his pocket? I’m putting it crudely, and yet, as nearly as I can tell, you cannot deny it. He puts us in his pocket, and somehow or other he has the right to make fun of us all. But why? And how? And where does it come from? It is certainly not a matter of his cleverness. One can hardly speak of cleverness in this case, I admit. He is much more a man of fuzziness and feelings, feelings are his cup of tea, so to speak—if you’ll forgive me the colloquial phrase. What I am saying is this: it is not by way of cleverness that he puts us in his pocket, not through intellectual prowess. You wouldn’t stand for that. And it really is out of the question. But surely it is not physical prowess, either! It cannot be because of his broad captain’s shoulders, or any raw brute force, or because he could lay any one of us flat with his fist—it would never occur to him that he could, and if it did, why, a few civilized words would calm him down. And so it’s not physical, either. And yet the physical dimension does play a role, without a doubt—not in the sense of brute strength, but in another, more mystical sense—the moment anything physical plays a role, things always get mystical. And the physical merges into the intellectual, and vice versa, and cannot be differentiated, and stupidity and cleverness cannot be differentiated. But the effect is there, the dynamic effect, and we find ourselves stuck in his pocket. And for that we have only one word at hand, and that word is ‘personality.’ We use the word in another, perfectly reasonable sense, too: we are all personalities—moral and legal and all those other sorts of personalities. But that is not what I mean. I’m talking about a mystery that extends beyond stupidity and cleverness, and that is what we need to concern ourselves with—partly to get to the bottom of it, if possible, and partly, to the extent that it is not possible, to edify ourselves. And if you are for values, then, in the end, personality is a positive value, too, I should think—a more positive value than stupidity or cleverness, positive in the highest degree, absolutely positive, like life itself—in short, a value for life and in that sense suitable for our earnest consideration. And that’s how I thought I should respond to what you said about stupidity.”
Herr Settembrini let silence reign. Then he said, “You deny that you are in hot pursuit of paradoxes. By now you should know that I have an equal dislike of seeing you in hot pursuit of mysteries. By turning personality into an enigma, you run the danger of idol-worship. You are venerating a mask. You see something mystical where there is only mystification, one of those hollow counterfeits with which the demon of corporeal physiognomy enjoys taunting us on occasion. You have never spent any time in theatrical circles, have you? So you do not know those thespian faces that can embody the features of a Julius Caesar, a Goethe, and a Beethoven all in one, but whose owners, the moment they open their mouths, prove to be the most miserable ninnies under the sun.”
“Fine, a freak of nature,” Hans Castorp said. “And yet not just a freak, not just something to taunt us. For people to be actors, they must have talent, and talent is something that goes beyond stupidity and cleverness, it is itself a value for life. Mynheer Peeperkorn has talent, too, no matter what you may say, and he uses it to put us in his pocket. Set Herr Naphta in the corner of a room and have him deliver a lecture on Gregory the Great and the City of God, something well worth listening to — and in the other corner have Peeperkorn stand there with his strange mouth and a brow raised in great creases and say nothing except, ‘By all means! Permit me to say—settled!’ And you will see people gather around Peeperkorn, down to the last man, and Naphta will be left sitting there alone with his cleverness and his City of God, although he can express himself so clearly that it makes your blood and spit run cold, to use one of Behrens’s phrases.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself, worshiping success like that,” Herr Settembrini chided him. “Mundus vult decipi. I do not demand that people flock around Herr Naphta. He is a dreadful obstructionist. But I would be inclined to stand at his side in the imaginary scene you have just painted with such reprehensible relish. Go ahead and despise distinctions, precision, logic, the coherence of the human word. Go ahead and despise it in favor of some sort of hocus-pocus of insinuation and emotional charlatanry—and the Devil will definitely have you in his—”

Two great recent startup stories (not in Silicon Valley, but both acquired by Google) – part 2 : wiz.io

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Reading a few articles about Deepmind (part 1 of this post) and the founders of Adallom and wiz.io, I remembered other stories of European startups or those founded by Europeans. I’m thinking of Spotify (see my posts in 2022 and 2018) or VMWare (see an older post from 2010). We see that more or less curbed ambition has led to different results. Wiz or Spotify have valuations in the tens of billions, Deepmind, Adallom and VMWare (first acquisition) in the hundreds of millions, while the second acquisition of VMWare was also in the tens of billions. I don’t know if there’s a pattern or if I’m creating it artificially, but it’s a bit as if an acquisition in the hundreds of millions was a semi-failure linked to the fear of too much competition or the impossibility of pursuing an independent adventure.

The double adventure of the founders of Adallom and Wiz.io goes a little in that direction. I read a few articles which reference you will find at the end of the article. And I will give the lessons learned by Assaf Rappaport from these two stories. A first success, Adallom bought in 2014 by Microsoft for $320M then a second, wiz.com which Google offered to buy a few days ago for $32B (i.e. 100 times more…) Unlike Deepmind, I did not have access to specific documents, so I had to make some assumptions like some others (see [2]) and cross-check the information available online. Here are the two capitalization tables. But here too, the advice given (which I repeat below) is just as important as this data.

First of all, what I take from the tables:
– Four founders whose story is a classic in Israel (see [1]) created Adallom and then wiz.io. In reality, I am not a big fan of the concept of serial entrepreneurs, but wonder if wiz.io is not rather the scaling up of Adallom like VMWare (2nd period) was for VMware (1st period) or by pushing very hard the Nobel Prize of Demis Hassabis the scaling up of Deepmind! We read in the press that the founders had earned around $25M with Adallom according to some sources and $3B with wiz.io, also a factor of about 100x.
– The same venture capital funds and partners are the investors – Gili Raanan for Sequoia then Cyberstarts and Shardul Shah for Index. These are rare enough to be mentioned especially since these funds intervened at the seed stage.
– For Adallom, multiples of 24x for Series A, 7x for Series B, and approximately 2x for Series C.
– For wiz.io, multiples of 475x for Seed, 73x for Series A, 20x for Series B, 5x, 3x, and 2.7x for Series C, D, and E.

All of this is arguable, but not uninteresting, and there’s a bit of a lottery aspect to it. Don’t get me wrong. Success is rare, never guaranteed. I remember a startup that was offered a $300 million acquisition. The founders and/or investors declined, thinking they were worth more. In the end, the acquisition price was $10 million.

About the ambition and uncertainty, it is also worth reading Shardul Shah (Index) on LinkedIn (Index Ventures just cemented its place as one of the all-time VC greats). Here are some quotes : “I don’t know why we’re talking about averages — none of us are in the business of mean reversion.” […] “I’m not seeking average returns. I’m not seeking good deals—I’m looking for outliers.” […] “I don’t seek comfort. You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We’re in the business of taking risk. I’m not a value investor, right? I believe in the power law.” […] “The hardest thing is identifying if you’re delusional or if you have conviction. Sometimes it can feel like a thin line.”

Finally I extract the lessons from Assaf Rappaport:
1. The team is more important than the idea. A startup is built not around an idea, which is going to change anyway, but around a team. The really good VC funds invest in talent, and not in products, ideas or business plans. And also: Don’t drag your feet when it comes to meeting with the best funds. Don’t leave them till the end.
2. One who listens to problems will find ideas. When you meet with customers, you’re not coming to convince them; rather, you’re there to learn from them. If you’re the one who spoke for more than a quarter of the meeting, it wasn’t a good conversation. Customers have problems that you didn’t even know existed, and the way to discover them is with question marks, not exclamation marks.
And also: You need some luck.
3. ‘No’ is the correct answer to determine whether the investor is serious. No matter what kind of offer you get – investment or acquisition – there’s only one response: ‘I really appreciate your offer, but no thanks.’ This kind of answer never deterred a determined investor or company – and if they’re not determined, they won’t invest in any case. And also: You need to prepare a media plan, both internal and external; when things leak, you’ll have only enough time to hit the Send button.
4. The exit is just the beginning of the hard work. On the day after being merged into a giant corporation, don’t sit back and wait until the options mature. Instead, adopt the commando approach: We’re part of a big army, but we belong to an elite unit.
5. Don’t be afraid of activism. In every company, a moment comes when you have to give the conservative corporate people a kick, and then go ahead and act. To be the best workplace and to recruit the best workers, you need to be brave and take a stand, engaging in social activism that gives rise to tremendous team spirit.
6. Take a deep breath and don’t exhale too soon. You shouldn’t be blinded by big money, instead, use it to quickly acquire paying customers, turn down acquisition offers of hundreds of millions of dollars, and grow the company rapidly so it will become a unicorn.
7. Today, it’s possible to overtake everyone with a computer and Zoom

Once again, risk-taking and limitless ambition.

References :
[1] : 7 lessons from reaching a $1.7 billion valuation in just one year https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3904610,00.html
[2] : WIZ, Esprit, es-tu là? Comment les fondateurs de Wiz refont des miracles après le succès d’Adallom https://trivialfinance.substack.com/p/wiz-esprit-es-tu-la

Two great recent startup stories (not in Silicon Valley, but both acquired by Google) – part 1 : DeepMind

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I probably have to admit a bias in favor of startups led by tech founders. It is what I have been advocating for decades now. So when I read about stories going that way, I am more than happy. Recently I was mentioned by friends a documentary movie entitled The Thinking Game.

I do not know why I had not looked at DeepMind before all the more it is pretty easy to get information about British companies and this is a British startup. So you read me, I built its cap. table when it was acquired by Google in 2014 for about

What I read in the table:
– 3 or 4 main cofounders, but Demis Hassibis had the biigest initial stake (80%),
– investors took high risk as the company did not have that much but talent initially, (and no revenue until acquisition ?)
– the main or at least most famous investors were Peter Thiel and Elon Musk,
– the company did not raise that much money : 2M£ in Feb. 2011, £15M in Dec. 2011 / Feb. 2012, finally £25M in 2013 before the £400M acquisition by Google in Jan. 2014.

That’s it for the basic facts. More importantly, the lessons in the article my friends sent to me are:
– First, DeepMind combines crystal-clear strategic clarity with never-ending tactical flexibility. What comes across in the film is the company’s extraordinary willingness to experiment wildly and fail persistently.
– Second, DeepMind’s mission has helped it recruit some remarkable scientific talent, critical to its success. In a discussion after the movie, Hassabis explained that he had always resisted investor pressure to move to Silicon Valley and had been determined to remain in London. “The UK has always been very strong in science and innovation and has a rich history in computing,” he said. “We are trying to carry on in that tradition.” Hassabis reckoned that there was a lot of under-utilised academic talent in Europe, and elsewhere, that could be attracted to London. So it has proved.
– Third, what was essential for DeepMind’s success was its ability to scale rapidly. Back in 2010, few VCs were prepared to go anywhere near a startup with such extravagant ambitions and no business plan. Much of its initial capital came from US investors, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The company also felt compelled to sell out to Google in 2014 to give it the capital, data and computing firepower necessary to stay at the leading-edge of AI. (The extra resources were essential for recruiting and retaining top talent, too).

Often not to say always the same lessons about risk taking and ambition…

PS: I have not watched the movie yet, so I may amend this post in the near future.

50 years of Technology Transfer at Stanford University

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Back to my favorite topic, that is Silicon Valley, after a few digressions. I just rediscovered a 2022 paper entitled Systematic analysis of 50 years of Stanford University technology transfer and commercialization. The full paper is available here. As a side comment, this has been motivated by recent articles about Technology Transfer in France and more specifically the study entitled “Étude sur la performance des SATT vis-à-vis d’une sélection d’OTT” (Study on the performance of SATTs vs. a selection of TTOs). Unfortunately, the study does not seem to be public and I could only read comments about it.

I have published a lot about Stanford University. The search engine gives the following here. So I will not go into much detail but just extract what I found interesting not to say surprising. Here it is:

– this is about money, but not only about money.

“The total net income of the inventions for all years considered is $581M, and the average net income is $0.13 M. Overall, most inventions have a negative net income, and only 20% of inventions in this dataset have produced positive net income.” Further in the paper “The invention licensing via OTLs represents only one facet of the transfer of technology from university to industry, though it is an important facet. [And] we primarily focus on net income as the outcome metric because it is straightforward to quantify and is a key metric of OTL’s own assessment. However, it is important to note that licensing income does not completely capture impact, and pursuing licensing income is not the ultimate goal of the Stanford OTL.”


Overview of the Stanford inventions data : Number of inventions by year that Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing marketed. The color of the stacked bar chart indicates whether the cumulative net income (until June 31, 2021) is positive.

– the most profitable inventions are predominantly licensed by inventors’ own startups.

“Around 20% of the inventions were licensed by the inventor’s own startups, which we refer to as “self-licensing.” Overall, the self-licensing rate increases over time. The interesting peak of the self-licensing rate in 1995–1999 might be related to the dot-com bubble. We also found that inventions with high net income are predominantly self-licensing inventions. For example, all inventions that have generated more than $10 M net income are self-licensed, and the self-licensing rate for the inventions with $1–$10 M net income is 59%. In contrast, the self-licensing rate for inventions with less than $10 K net income is 16%. This finding is consistent with previous research showing that startups with direct connections to the university tend to be more successful than otherwise similar startups.” There is a more general side comment here : “Shane et al. found that new ventures with founders having direct and indirect relationships with venture investors are most likely to receive venture funding.”


Self-licensing (inventions licensed by the inventor’s own startups)
(A) The fraction of inventions licensed by inventor startups over time.
(B) The fraction of inventions in each net income group that the inventors license. The sample sizes for each net income category are: <$10 K: 3,776 inventions; $10–$100 K: 465 inventions; $100 K–$1 M: 212 inventions; $1–$10 M: 56 inventions; ≥$10 M: 5 inventions.

– inventions have involved larger teams over time. There is also an interesting side comment : “Smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones.”

“In addition, we found that the inventions from teams of only first-time inventors have a higher net income than other inventions. This highlights the importance of being open to first-time inventors.” This is correlated with my analysis of serial entrepreneurs, I had found they have a tendency to do worse over time.. See Serial entrepreneurs: are they better?

I will briefly conclude that this is a very interesting new study of Stanford’s contribution to innovation, which confirms well-known things and adds much less known ones. A must-read for experts and “food for thought” for the others!

Xavier Niel – A real desire to cause trouble

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I listened to Xavier Niel on France Culture on December 6th and I had the confirmation of a relatively atypical character. Asked in particular about Elon Musk, here is his answer: Xavier Niel distinguishes between the entrepreneur, “probably the best in the world”, and the character, “completely crazy and potentially dangerous”. He praises his willingness to consider savings for the American state: “if he applies these savings in a reasoned way, to reduce the operating costs of the American state, I am sure that it will go very well. If, after that, we start to overflow, that’s nonsense!”, he qualifies. According to Xavier Niel, it is not so much the fact of paying fot Twitter 45 billion to own the social network that poses a problem, but rather the fact that the product takes on the image of its owner, “which is less exciting”, considers the boss of Free. The price doesn’t shock me if he sets up a plan that will make this company generate money. The purpose of a company is to bring together three parties: employees, customers and shareholders. Consequently, these three parties must be happy. However, the customers are not happy in his case.” In the dialogue he establishes with Jean-Louis Missika, we find a rather fascinating character who uses “ouais” (yeah) and “nan” (nope) as if he were still the kid from Crétail where he grew up. The character is a billionaire but his career has not prevented him from (or perhaps helped him to) staying down to earth unlike some of his counterparts in Silicon Valley.

I liked this book which doesn’t give advice but allows you to understand certain things about his character and his vision of entrepreneurship. A first example: I believe that youthfulness as a state of mind is essential. It is found more often in young people, because when we get older, we become richer, we harden. Youthfulness allows you to create incredible things. You don’t yet have the constraints that are imposed on you when you get older. With age, society imposes limits on you, you no longer have the optimism or the attitude towards risk that you had in youth. Whereas when you are 20 years old, when you leave school, you want to eat the world; you want to do crazy things. [Page 35]

Beyond the usual explanations about this world, Niel expresses unfailing optimism. When I started investing in startups, I was convinced that all entrepreneurs were going to be successful, that they were all going to create huge companies. Well, there were a few disappointments, but you get the idea. In another genre, I thought that Putin was threatening to invade Ukraine but would never act. Just like I thought that Covid would be over in 3 days, and that Brexit would never happen. I am a walking disaster when it comes to forecasts, because I am too optimistic. There are people who use the word “genius” to talk about me; it’s ridiculous, I am absolutely not a genius. I have two strengths, which are based precisely on my lack of intelligence: the simplification of problems, and naivety. […]
JLM: And when it fails?
XN: And when it fails, I forget and move on. Because if you let yourself get discouraged by your failures, or if you listen to everyone who tells you “it’s impossible”, you do nothing. […] When I created Station F, I hoped to welcome 1000 start-ups. And François Hollande, to whom I presented the project, said to me: “But are you sure there are 1000 start-ups in France?” Well, you know what, at the time, I had never asked myself the question! Yet it’s a logical question, I should have thought about it, done a market study, that kind of thing. [Page 39]

The important thing is not the project, it’s the founder. [Page 133]

With Kima, yeah, we have a method. We spread the risks. We invest small amounts – around 150,000 euros – in a hundred start-ups each year. Between failures and trade sales, we must have 1,500 participations.
JLM: Less than fifty that work out of 1,500, that’s not a lot…
XN: It’s part of the game. Yes, you’re wrong, and you’re wrong often. […] We don’t finance success, we finance progress. […] Of all my investments, [Square] is the most spectacular performance. I think we did x1,000. […]

The Americans I know who had success with their start-ups were all developers. [Page 139]

Not only did they have the idea for their product, but they also developed their own software, website or app. Google, Facebook, Snapchat, they were all created like that: by people who coded their own products. Hence this idea that a start-up has a better chance of succeeding when there is a coder among its founders. That’s why I created 42.
[whereas] unicorn founders, I love them, but they always have the same faces: three white guys who went to business school [page 145]

Being an entrepreneur is [page 146]

choosing what you do during the day. If you don’t want to make something, you don’t do it. You create your own job. There’s no greater freedom. Is that okay, is that convincing enough?
JLM: Rather. But you’re forgetting the pressure…
XN: That’s not what’s important. What’s important is what you’re capable of creating. […] For me, this desire to create something from an idea, to bring together different people to bring something to society, create value, invent a different product, help the most disadvantaged. Entrepreneurship is an attitude, a state of mind. You don’t need to start a company to be an entrepreneur. Are you launching an association, a project, a social media account with a real editorial line? For me, you’re an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship isn’t just about business. You can be an entrepreneur in humanitarian, social, educational, environmental, and so on.

A desire for revenge? [Page 204]

The taste for the game is enough in itself. No need for psychology. Everyone likes to play; it’s the playing fields that differ. Mine was the telecom market. Everything is a fucking game. An eternal game, that people have been playing since the beginning of the world. So I play, and whatever the game, I want to win. I want to be first. It’s more or less long, sometimes you get overtaken. And then you catch up. That’s what gives life spice.

[…] When I try to understand why I failed, it’s not because I regret having lost money. It’s because I want to be number one. […] Nope, I just like winning. Money is just a signal that you have won a game, because you are playing with money. [page 205]

Niel is not naive. He is even a fighter. When he returned to Créteil to talk to the “kids” It is not easy to catch their attention. We are mostly white, old, even old fools. So I have a trick to wake them up. I tell them: “I also went to school here in Créteil, and then I went to jail.” And then all of a sudden, the kids wake up. [Page 22] He also admits “Me, since I was little, I wanted to earn money” [page 15] while his first words of the interview are “Frankly, I had the happiest childhood in the world. We were a very close-knit family. I swear, everything was perfect. I was so happy that I thought I was the king of the world, and that my parents hid it from me so that I could have a normal life.”

My closest friends are entrepreneurs, some are Americans, some of whom have created social networks or others are investors. I like entrepreneurs because they are different, because they have a little grain of madness, because I am never bored with them: people see me as a billionaire, but I see myself as an entrepreneur. [Page 222]

How do you explain the excesses of entrepreneurs? [Page 227]

JLM: When Elon Musk challenges Mark Zuckerberg to an MMA fight, everyone laughs but he ridicules the ecosystem. In a less visible way, the positions taken by Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen are just as sulphurous, and give the impression of a caste that believes itself above ordinary mortals. You know them a little, how do you explain these excesses?

XN: The people you mentioned are very different from each other. There are some who are a little crazy and who believe they have superior intelligence. And there are others who are a little like children in the playground. It’s… special: But that doesn’t prevent them from having their charm and being interesting. […] But they’re not all like that. And besides, they left Silicon Valley. It’s a part of the ecosystem. Very noisy, yes, but only a part of it.

JLM: We don’t hear the others anymore. They’re nowhere to be seen.

XN: That’s not true, they just do something else. And then if you take the current boss of Google, Sundar Pichai, he’s an Indian immigrant who doesn’t consider himself superior to the rest of humanity. I don’t know his political ideas, but I’m sure they’re quite different from Elon Musk’s. […] Elon Musk only represents himself. He’s locked himself into a transgressive extremist persona and I don’t know how he’s going to get out of it, because by talking bullshit, the time comes when you pay for it. The moral is that you can be both a brilliant entrepreneur and a dirty jerk.

You know when you talk to them, you find yourself in an unreal world, where disruptive innovation is always for tomorrow morning. How many times have I heard that nuclear fusion is in a year. Same for carbon capture. That’s what makes entrepreneurs strong: for them, if you don’t try, you have no chance of succeeding: So they try, again and again. That’s why, despite all their questionable attitudes, I love these people so much.

As a conclusion

I have already discussed the excesses of Silicon Valley, for example here. Its excesses sadden me and yet, I have a certain fascination for the achievements of its entrepreneurs. This is probably the same reason why I also enjoyed reading Une sacrée envie de foutre le bordel (A real desire to cause trouble). We may not agree at all with Xavier Niel. We may not agree with everything Xavier Niel says. The book is full of exciting anecdotes and also of questionable points of view, we must simply remember that the man is optimistic and defends freedom almost without limits. His limit is the law, and even that… not at the beginning.

I take a step aside. My darling made me discover the beginnings of the MGMT band through an article of FIP MGMT: a magical video of “Kids” in 2003 surfaces

Xavier Niel’s book has a bit of this effect. We often find the child behind the billionaire, his style, his passions. We discover that the entrepreneur is a cataphile. He ventures there about once a month, much more when he was younger…

The last sentence of the book [page 300]: F…!, it’s still indecent, how lucky I was!

PS. For those interested in politics and Silicon Valley, a seminar throughout the first half of 2025 seems to have an enticing program, Digital Capitalism and Ideologies.

Silicon F…! Valley

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It’s a podcast from France Culture that introduced me to Arte’s new series, Silicon Fucking Valley. I’ll take two sentences from it: “Stories that are sometimes well-known but always necessary to recall in order to participate in our digital culture and allow everyone to be able to decode our connected world a little” and “I had a little more trouble with the sometimes frenetic pace of the episodes, which are stuck in 15 short minutes. A voice-over, very present, which accompanies the viewer a little too much, who would sometimes benefit from breathing to find the time to construct their own thoughts. The writing follows the recipes of videos published on social networks whose objective is to capture attention.”

And I want to add, without, I hope, coming across as the grumpy one, that the series is sometimes lazy due to its inaccuracies, even if of little importance:
– why say that the Stanford campus (7km2) is a third of the area of ​​Paris (which is 100km2)?
– why say that the diplomas of this university are awarded on the Quad when they are rather awarded in the stadium where Steve Jobs made his famous speech (1st article of this blog)?
– why say that the tuition fees amount to $80,000 when they are $65,000 already (forgetting to add that at the Master’s level, I think that a majority of students have a scholarship or a sponsor…)?
– why say that the Computer History Museum is in Menlo Park when it is in Mountain View?

If we forget these details and this frantic pace, then, yes, there are some very interesting things. You will discover Luc Julia and Adam Cheyer at the origin of Siri from SRI (check CALO), a startup sold to Apple for “$200M according to the rumor” and which did not leave me with very good memories because EPFL should have gotten a bigger piece of the pie during that sale. Julia is right, it was crap. The F… word is appropriate!

You will also discover Curious Marc. It may also remind you of what the “Mother of All Demos” was (with a strange acronym). And more seriously, the recent evolution with GAFAs. Here are two illustrations: the number of acquisitions of each actor and the amount of fines paid in Europe and the USA.


It’s also about Venture Capital and mythical San Hill Road

And despite all the nonsense, to say the least, of the founder of Tesla, the series confirms what I had discovered a few years ago about the demographics of parking lots: The University-based Startup Porsche Principle. Or is it the Tesla Principle?

But the most touching episode remains the 6th on the wealth gap, “for one tech developer, there are six poor people who clean, serve in cafeterias, provide security, drive Google buses” and have the choice between driving 6 hours a day or sleeping in a tent or a camper van on the side of the road. The title is then telling, Silicon Fucking Valley.

PS (Nov. 24, 2024) : my favorite documentary movie remains so far SomethingVentured, see https://www.startup-book.com/2012/02/08/something-ventured-a-great-movie/

Tech giants : nothing changes but their names !

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I love data and I love analyzing them at the micro (cap tables) and macro level (revenues, income, employees). But I am surprised to discover that I had not posted about this since 2021:
– Tesla, Google and Facebook do not suffer from the crisis showed the grwoth of these giants as of February 2021,
– The largest technology companies in Europe and the USA in 2020 compared about 30 American and 15 European public firms as of January 2021.

What I have updated below does not see much change, except may be Google is Alphabet and Facebook is Meta. Tesla has not changed its name but Twitter is X! So with not much comment, here are first the largest technology companies in Europe and the USA in 2024 :


The conclusion is similar, US companies are about 10 times bigger in market cap. and sales, 5 times in employees number. I even fear the gap is bigger. I also love the following three charts which illustrate similarites in firm growth.



Maybe all this is not that good and has contributed to the planet destruction with being aware of it. Maybe innovation is not solving much and destroying a lot. These are just numbers as food for thought.

Beyond Silicon Valley Ideology

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In my previous post, I mentioned this anthology of articles compiled by Loup Cellard and Guillaume Heuguet. Consisting of six articles (5 of which are translated) and a long introduction by the authors, it is a most interesting dive into what this region represents from a historical and political point of view.

So here is what I noted:

– the authors restrain the influence of the counterculture in the origins of Silicon Valley. “The economic power and the culture of technical innovation of the region far precede the hippie movement.” [page 18] then “government contracts or the existence of a surplus of capital should probably be given as much importance as utopian imaginaries” [page 19].

– The authors go further regarding the ideological inclinations of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. I have already expressed a certain skepticism on the subject but the debate remains interesting. The authors mention another book on this subject that I am not familiar with, Une histoire politique de la Silicon Valley (A Political History of Silicon Valley) by Fabien Benoit. I do not believe that the following statement is correct: “Stanford University, which specializes in hard sciences, has the particularity of not claiming intellectual property rights on patents developed within its walls.” [Page 19] The subject is well-known (see here) and I am surprised by such a statement. Mariana Mazzucato is also called to the rescue of the arguments and if I have also expressed strong nuances there, one can hardly doubt the influence of Fred Terman, HP and MIT well before the emergence of the counterculture.

– In the same introduction, Bill Gates’ open letter to the Hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club is mentioned.

This introduction by the authors is fascinating and we have once again the confirmation of the complexity of the genesis of the region where hippies like Wozniak and engineers like Noyce often collaborated with the greatest respect. (See again this article for the curious, The tinkerings of Robert Noyce)

– The articles about design are surprising given how fashionable the subject has been (and had so far left me circumspect and silent). Fred Turner’s chapter Such Old Promises is an interesting analysis of the links between prototyping and Protestant puritanism! Ruha Benjamin’s article, translated as Le design est complice (Design is an Accomplice) goes much further. I take away the following strong statements: “Design Thinking is Bullh*t” and the author “urges practitioners to avoid jargon and trendy buzzwords and to engage more in self-criticism: what are the theoretical and practical effects of using the language of design to describe all our hopes, dreams, critiques and visions of change? What is gained and by whom in the process of associating such heterogeneous things under the rubric of design? […] I think one of the reasons it reigns is that it has managed to fold everything and anything under its agile wings”.

– The authors are very critical of some of the region’s personalities that they associate with the ancient world. Charlie Tyson’s Reactionaries invest (Les réactionnaires investissent) is an interesting analysis of Peter Thiel who would like to present himself as an intellectual. And the conclusion is: “The man himself remains a mystery […] who offers us the spectacle of a brilliant mind housed in a deformed personality, a man who has transformed his armchair philosophy into an imposed vision of the world”. The following chapter, Capital risks nothing (Le Capital ne risque rien( by Fabien Foureault is a fairly correct description of the history of venture capital. The only criticism I would make is that the transition from American roots to the history of the activity in France somewhat forgets the risks taken by the pioneers in the 60s and 70s. The criticism of venture capital remains well argued as follows: on three major criteria, VC is criticized:
+ a dysfunctional character that prevents stability through boom and burst cycles
+ a lack of social utility by moving towards short-term profitability that forgets the fundamental issues (climate, affordable health)
+ an unprofitable activity, at best with a low return of 8% in the long term. I discovered a researcher, Ludovic Phalippou, very critical of Private Equity in general which lack of transparency leads to undoubtedly very overestimated performances. I encourage you to read How Ludovic Phalippou Became the Bête Noire of Private Equity. The post-sciptum will undoubtedly make smile fans and connoisseurs of French venture capital…

– What can I say about the last two chapters? They are simply fascinating. First of all, Optimization Replaces Progress by Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell. I had the intuition that optimization, a subject that is dear to me since it was at the heart of my doctoral thesis, was reaching the limits of progress. We no longer seek the best, but to be smart, intelligent, whether it be the city, mobility, education or war. The best being inaccessible, we simply seek to do better, and often while minimizing resources and costs… and to be resilient, which the authors describe as the ability not to be robust in a stable system, but to survive and win in an uncertain and unbalanced system. Disruption is not far away. The chapter’s conclusion may seem scary: “Instead of seeking utopian answers to our questions about the future, we focus on quantitative and algorithmic methods and logistics: how to move things from point A to point B, rather than asking where they should end up (or whether they should even be there)” [page 129].

– The last chapter is called Apocalypse Replaces Utopia by Dave Karpf. It is about long-termism. “The moral value of human life today is no different from that of potential post-humans who might come into existence in the distant future. From this premise, they come to fantastical and counterintuitive conclusions. They claim that economic growth, technological progress, and the prevention of existential risks, i.e. risks that could wipe out humanity (asteroid strikes, deadly super viruses, hostile artificial intelligence, etc.) matter most to humanity. Improving the situation of humanity today by addressing systemic inequalities, curing cancer, and preventing malaria are lesser initiatives. Today’s humans are merely the precursors of a post-human future scattered across space.” The promoters of such ideas are known and the author speaks of the Californian Ideology. I would like to think that they are only in the heads of a few deformed minds. The author concludes: “We should therefore recognize long-termism as a pernicious movement of thought. It is a philosophy that says we should not concern ourselves with the fate, dignity or injustices suffered by people living today, because these people do not matter more than those who will live millennia from now. […] It is a recipe that too easily excuses cruelty, suffering and social harm.

So this is a fascinating little book, which does not describe Silicon Valley, but through its roots and wings, some of its most astonishing excesses. And as I said in my previous post, this does not necessarily represent the majority, but at least a minority, perhaps tiny but undoubtedly very and too visible.

PS: for those who are not interested in long analyses, here is a rather funny video

Politics and Silicon Valley

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This post is motivated by an article by Olivier Alexandre for La Tribune. This CNRS sociologist, whom I have already mentioned here because I appreciate his analyses of Silicon Valley, summarizes an interview on his LinkedIn page entitled The tragedy is that Silicon Valley has come to push reactionary programs, La tragédie est que la Silicon Valley en vient à pousser des programmes réactionnaires.

I wanted to react on LinkedIn but this site limits the length of comments. Here is what I would have liked to write: There might be a book to write about the left and tech, particularly in Silicon Valley. If Silicon Valley has always been a progressive region, at least in the north close to San Francisco and Berkeley, I don’t remember meeting many “left-wing people” at Stanford or in tech companies. Not to mention that being left-wing in the United States probably doesn’t have quite the same meaning as in Europe. The individualist, even anarchist component (I prefer not to talk about libertarians who I’m not sure represent a large number of people) remains very strong among Republicans and Democrats who always seem a little wary of central power, a central power whose attraction remains a very French particularity on the contrary. There was indeed the dinner offered by Obama at the White House with the tech elite, www.startup-book.com/2011/03/28/the-whos-who-of-silicon-valley/ and it is anecdotally quite amusing to see in the donations to the parties (see for example here www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib?cycle=2024&ind=F2500) that the two major historical funds of American venture capital lean differently, Sequoia towards the Republicans and Kleiner Perkins towards the Democrats, even in 2024.

It is not surprising that entrepreneurs are rather right-wing, it seems quite universal to me. Looking back at the early days of Silicon Valley, it seems that the big semiconductor entrepreneurs like Robert Noyce were mostly moderate Republicans who mostly tried to influence Washington to protect their industry from Japanese competition. More recently, Kleiner Perkins had recruited Colin Powell as a partner (www.nytimes.com/2005/07/13/business/colin-powell-joins-venture-capital-firm.html), who was not known for being a very left-wing politician. Finally, I have never really seen the founders of Apple or Google take a position on any political issue, but I have noted how all these companies from Intel to Google were “scared to death” of seeing unions set up shop in their company. Politics seems rather absent. Perhaps Fred Turner could inform us on the subject and write the book I am talking about if it does not already exist?

And a blog post allows to go further, so I continue. I talk about politics from time to time, as the #politics tag indicates, but probably not enough. I have rightly or wrongly stayed away from activism and taking positions, just like a lot of people in the world of technology and Silicon Valley, I will come back to that. But again, you can browse the articles linked to the previous tag. I have also just ordered the book entitled Au delà de l’idéologie de la Silicon Valley (Beyond Silicon Valley Ideology) after reading the one in Esprit magazine a few years ago.

What more can I say? I found another site that doesn’t give the amounts of people’s donations to political campaigns, but a profile of tech personalities, including their political leanings. It’s quite interesting. It has profiles of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, the two founders of Google, John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) and Michael Moritz (Sequoia). All four lean toward the center-left or left of center, but in a rather discreet way.

More recently, a long analysis of the region showed that it is rather progressive and Democrat, except on one point, that of regulation: The vast majority of tech entrepreneurs are Democrats — but a different kind of Democratt.

I really liked Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance. I knew he was a Republican, but I thought he was a moderate and anti-Trump. What a disappointment, not to say what a sad character. So bravo to Jennifer Aniston for her recent review: Jennifer Aniston criticizes JD Vance for ‘childless cat ladies’ remarks: ‘I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children’. There are also the (too?) well-known positions of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, but again, I don’t know if they represent a majority opinion in tech. Do we know that well that Jeff Skoll, founder of eBay, has become a producer of particularly interesting, not to say brilliant, movies?

Politics should belong as much to those who speak and act quietly as to those who speak so loudly that we end up believing they represent the opinion of the majority…

The Cockroach’s strategy according to Serge Kinkingnéhun

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I regularly follow the publications of Serge Kinkingnéhun, whose strong statements are such as “I apply the properties of the cockroach to startups to make them invulnerable” so I read with delight his recent book La stratégie du cafard (The Cockroach’s strategy), which subtitle is also strong: “Cockroach perhaps, but I create profitable startups”

So why such a love for cockroaches (rather than unicorns)? The author refers to an article by Catarina Fake dating from September 2015: The Age of the Cockroach from which I take a brief extract: A Plague is coming to kill off the Unicorns. Inflated and unsustainable valuations, a shaky stock market, a weak China, and the aftermath of excessive enthusiasm are all pointing to the inevitable. Who will survive? As always, the less glamorous, but very hardy Cockroaches.

He could have cited Paul Graham who wrote on his blog in 2008: Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible. For years I’ve been telling founders that the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world. The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. So the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill. And fortunately it has gotten very cheap to run a startup. A recession will if anything make it cheaper still. And related to the topict, the founder of AirBnB was proud to be treated as such by the founder of YCombinator: Surprisingly, Paul [graham] said, “If you can convince people to pay $40 for a $4 box of cereal, maybe you can get strangers to stay in other strangers’ homes.” He also liked that we were resilient, calling us “cockroaches.” In the midst of an investment nuclear winter, he believed only the cockroaches would survive, and apparently, we were one of them. More here.

Serge Kinkingnéhun dedicates his book to all entrepreneurs who want to remain free! adding Live Free or Die. Does he want to indicate that being a cockroach is a way of being happy because it is invulnerable? The author pertinently recalls a certain number of fundamentals of entrepreneurship. Its chapter 2 is entitled A startup is first and foremost a business [Page 20]. However, this is not exactly what Steve Blank explains here. Whether a startup is a business or a business in the making, there is a consensus on the necessary survival of the organization and that its main fuel is money, the use of which must be optimal.

Serge Kinkingnéhun gives a multitude of excellent advice such as the answer to the title of chapter three When to start your startup? [Page 103]: as late as possible, that is to say when cash flow requires the creation of a bank account. He explains How to sell without a product or service (Page 27]. He also explains How to find non-dilutive financing [Page 129] And he has numerous examples such as KFC, Free by Xavier Niel, MailChimp, CoolMiniOrNot (CMON) for what is the crowdfunding strategy of the latter.

I must not give the impression of an excessive fascination with cockroaches. Indeed ! The book remains very focused on a particular and very French situation; namely that the state through subsidies (multiple grants) and favorable taxation (the Research Tax Credit for example) allows businesses to survive. I’m not sure it promotes growth, even slow growth. Furthermore, the examples given are always fascinating but not necessarily exemplary. Cmon, Mailchimp, Free seem to have been possible because the founders had (had) an entrepreneurial activity which facilitated the launch of the new one. The world of food and/or mass distribution shows a very large proportion of unlisted companies as indicated on Wikipedia, companies which in their own way undoubtedly started like Serge Kinkingnéhun’s cockroaches without ever external funding but bank loans.

In reality, entrepreneurs are often cockroaches. In high-tech, there was more than just MailChimp. There was GoDaddy, Navision, or even more famous Oracle or Microsoft, companies which were able to grow their revenues without using (or very little) fundraising. There is no doubt that this is the strongest way to grow. I am not convinced that all of the world’s technology could have reached this stage without the particular model of venture capital, the limits of which the author clearly shows. Investors are impatient, sometimes incompetent. It is therefore better to know who you are dealing with and how.

But I remain cautious about the fact that inventiveness and frugality would be exclusive alternatives as promising as what venture capital has brought to the world of technology over the past fifty years. VC has a history and a reason for existing. It has excesses too. But I still think its existence stems from a need to find a way to launch a business before customer revenue is a possibility. Intel, Apple, Google were undoubtedly born from this constraint. Inventiveness and creativity have also been part of their history. I am therefore not convinced that we can systematically create quickly profitable startups (at least in high-tech).

(And on another sidenote which would deserve an article, I just like unicorns as little as I like cockcroaches, as they are the result of a deviation from the world of startup financing, by the arrival of exuberant actors who have forgotten or did not know the rules of financing of startups, based in fact on inventiveness and frugality… but that’s another subject. You can for example read How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism)

Another important nuance: I am not an entrepreneur and Serge Kinkingnéhun is. There is probably neither a single typology of entrepreneurs as the author indicates. What is important is that the actions are in harmony with the personality, ambitions and intentions of the actors.

PS: In an article on LinkedIn, the excellent and funny Michael Jackson mentions the scarcity of IPOs in software in recent years.

The reasons for such scarcity have to do with startup funding and exit modes on markets such as Nasdaq. It would be interesting to check how many of them were cockroaches. I do not have the answer. More broadly, I noted that of the more than 900 startups whose capitalization table I recreated, only 6 had not raised funds from private investors.