Author Archives: Hervé Lebret

Silicon Valley – more of the same?

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I was cleaning and filing old papers in my office, when I found “old” books about Silicon Valley and noticed how this amazing region has not really changed in the last 30 years. Let me just elaborate. The first book I looked at is Silicon Valley Fever.

Here is the back cover:

The next one is The New Venturers

with its back cover too:

Both were written in the mid-eighties. The New Venturers does not seem to be printed anymore and I wrote on Amazon in 2009, when I bought it, “In the mid 80s John Wilson published this book about venture capital. At the time, it was about business and how venture capital works. It has now become a history book and it shows how Silicon Valley developed in part thanks to venture capital. It is full of anecdotes, facts and figures. A great book… ”

Silicon Valley Fever is also out of print and there is no review for that one on Amazon! It is also a book I enjoyed reading. As a funny coincidence, the authors began their book with their history of Apple whereas my first chapter was the history of Google. Each decade has its role models. There is a section about Women and Entrepreneurship that Pemo Theodore would certainly appreciate: “The Silicon Valley has been called “one of the last great bastions of male dominance” by the local Peninsula Times Tribune. […] They are under-represented in management and administration. Few women have technical or engineering backgrounds. […] Why there are few women in positioning of responsability in Silicon Valley is complex and puzzling. Until recently, the overwhelming majority of engineering garduates were men. […] Scientific and engineering professionals in the finance community and in start-ups are likely to be men: these power-brokers rely exclusively on tehir personal networks. […] Twenty of the largest publicly held Silicon Valley firms listed a total of 209 persons as corporate officers in 1980; only 4 were women. The board of directors of these 20 firms include 150 directors. Only one was a woman: Shirley Hufstedler, serving on the board of Hewlett-Packard.” But the authors are optimistic: they explain that any woman with a technical background or an interest in high-tech has opportunities: “A Martian with three heads could find a job in Silicon Valley. So for women with a technical background, it’s terrific. […] An exception to masculine dominance is Sandy Kurtzig. “I wanted to start in a garage like HP, but I didn’t have one. So I started in a second bedroom of my apartment.” At first, Kurtzig did sales, bookkeeping and management of her start-up. As long as she had only five or six employees, they worked out of her apartment. It went into rapid growth and had annual sales in 1982.”

Part I of the book is historical, part II is the culture of Silicon Valley and part III is about its future (as foreseen in 1984). The final book I found is certainly not out of print. Written 10 years later by Annalee Saxenian, Regional Advantage is the reference book about Silicon Valley. It is one of my bibles. Saxenian compares the culture of Silicon Valley and Route 128 (the Boston cluster).

Funnily enough, she had this honnest recognition in 1998: “In 1979, I was a graduate student at Berkeley and I was one of the first scholars to study Silicon Valley. I culminated my master’s program by writing a thesis in which I confidently predicted that Silicon Valley would stop growing. I argued that housing and labor were too expensive and the roads were too congested, and while corporate headquarters and research might remain, I was convinced that the region had reached its physical limits and that innovation and job growth would occur elsewhere during the 1980s. As it turns out I was wrong.” (Source: A climate for Entrepreneurship)

Let me just put here pictures of the preface of the book that you can find on Amazon or Google books. It is enlighting and will be my conclusion of this post: Silicon Valley was and is the innovation center with many ups and downs that these three books describe with their own style.

dot.dead, a Silicon Valley mystery

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I seldom mention novels here. In fact, I only did it one with the excellent “The Ultimate Cure” by Peter Harboe-Schmidt. I nearly bought by accident dot.dead, the first novel written by Keith Raffel, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned into a thriller writer. And I enjoyed it.

There is no point in telling you anything about the story. It may not be very realistic, but which mystery novel is? The description of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto and Stanford University is nice and accurate though  and you have the feeling you are back there if you know the places. What I also enjoyed and what is relevant for this blog are the links with the high-tech start-up world.So let me quote Raffel.

– An interesting comment about motivation to be an entrepreneur (page 42), maybe the most surprising thing in the book! “She asked if the hard work required to start a business was worth it. […] -[It is] a kind of Catch-22. To found a successful company, you had to think it was more important than anything. But if you were intelligent enough to run such a company, you had to know it wasn’t. Realizing that, you could not have the drive needed to start the next Sun, HP…”

– A much less important detail (page 45): “[The company] had gone public at $12 a share. After three two-for-one splits, [he] had sold the company for $42 a share. An investment like this might explain the […] comfortable circumstances.” I let you compute the multiple!

– Of course, when you read a fiction about Silicon Valely, you may try to guess if the author found inspiration in real individuals. Paul is the easy one (page 16): “While not quite at the level of Bill Hewlett or Dave Packard, Paul still rated as a Silicon Valley legend. Born in Hungary, Pál Békés had been a baby when his parents carried him across the border into Austria during the 1956 revolution. Paul Berk, as his parents rechristened him, graduated from the Bronx School of Sciences at sixteen and from Stanford…” Well it is not exactly the personal history of Andy Grove at Wikipedia but close enough: “During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he was 20, András István Gróf left his home and family and escaped across the border into Austria, where he eventually made his way to the United States in 1957. There, he changed his name to Andrew S. Grove. Arriving in the United States in 1957, with little money, Grove retained a “passion for learning.” He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960, and earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963.”

– The other people I tried to identify with less success are the board members of the company (page 57): in addition to Paul, there is
” Bryce Smithwick, board member as well as corporate counsel. sat to Paul’s right, leaning forward an Armani-clad leopard.
” Darwin Yancey, the technical genius behind Paul’s previous company. As usual Darwin’s glasees had slipped down his nose so that he peered at Paul with his head cocked back. Darwin had worked eighteen hour days [in the previous start-up] but to everyone one surprise had not followed Paul to [his new start-up]. Instead, he retired with his millions in the south of France. “My wife told me that our firrst twenty years of marriage belonged to work and that the next twenty years belonged to her.”
“A rare representative of her gender in the macho world of top venture capitalists, Margot Fullbright had cofounded Chance and Fullbright. Seated next to me, she had her hands folded on the table like a prim schoolgirl. A sideways glance showed me that the short skirt of her expensive suit was designed to show off the thighs of a Parisian runway model, not a buisiness executive. But Margot, approaching fifty, had a body toned as much as shiatsu, Bikram yoga, and two-thousand-dollar-a-day spas could achieve. Known for her ability to do complex calculations in her head, her mind was in even better shape.
“The fifth board member, wearing his trademark bowtie, hie crew-cut hiar beginning to show a few flecks of gray, was leon Henderson, a Stanford professor. A handful of former students, inculding three Fortune 500 CEOS, had thrown him a sixty-fifth birthday party the previous January. I myself had taken his entrepreneurship course and now met him vevery month or two for breakfast at Stanford’s Tresidder Union, where he offered me parctical advice on management and product positioning.

I do not know who these people are. There are a few women in VC, including Ann Winblad and Esther Dyson. Raffel is right, it is a macho world. They could all exist and look like SV stereotypes.


Ann Winblad (left) – Esther Dyson (right)

Another detail on bankers (page 100): “I had the natural prejudice against investment bankers. We worked seventy-hour weeks to make a start-up successful. Then, when the payoff came, investment bankers got a six-percent cut for a few weeks’ effort.”

Raffel could not avoid telling his Silicon Valley history (page 107). Nicely written: “Riding in the back of my parents’ Country Squire station wagon thirty years earlier, I would have been passing apricot orchards and horse trails. We didn’t know it, but they had already been condemned when William Shockley opened a company in 1955 to exploit his invention of the transistor. In an almost biblical sense, Shockley Semiconductor was the progenitor of hundreds of the firms flourishing in the Valley, for people from Shockley begat Fairchild and people from Fairchild begat Intel and someone from Intel begat Apple, and so on. In a variation on the biblical theme, two of Shockley’s most promising disciples, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, revolted against the founding father of the Valley to start that first competitor, Fairchild Semiconductor. Shockley was left claiming betrayal and ended his days using his Nobel Prize to defend his indefensible view on eugenics. This drama set the tone for Valley culture: young, brilliant technologists breaking away from companies run by the previous generation of entrepreneurs and founding their own.”

I plan to discover soon if Raffel’s latest novels bring pieces of interesting data.

Another French start-up going public!

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They may not be that many, but it is at least the 3rd French start-up going public in 2011, after Sequans and Envivio. Whereas these two ones went public on Nasdaq and NYSE, Mauna Kea Technologies went public in August on Paris Euronext. I did not anything about MKT until recently but I looked at their IPO prospectus.

A nice entrepreneurial story. Two founders, apparently friends before high school, launched MKT in 2000. Benjamin Abrat (MBA, a few years with Givaudan) and Sacha Loiseau (Ecole Polytechnique, PhD in astrophysics and a postdoc at Caltech) are the typical young entrepreneurs with not so much experience but probably a lot of mutual trust.

Not so common, in France at least, is the funding history:
– a seed round of €1.6M with the renowned French business angels: Marc Vasseur (Genset), Jérôme Chailloux (Ilog), Jean-Luc Nahon (Isdnet), Christophe Bach (Isdnet), Patrice Giami (Isdnet), Philippe Maes (Gemplus) and Daniel Legal (Gemplus)
– a 1st round in 2004, €5M
– a 2nd round in 2007, €20M
with a €50M IPO this year. here is my usual format for the equity history and structure.


(click on image to enlarge)

In an interview (in French), Sacha Loiseau gives his views on what French PhDs are lacking:
“What do you think of the PhD training ?
S. L. : It brings autonomy and initiative, two important qualities for fundamental or applied research. However, the French system does not cover other important topics, which are essential to the business world: the customer, teamwork, market intelligence, intellectual property and technology transfer, as well as mastering the English language. The strong point is that, facing tough problems, PhD students learn how to find a solution, often alone. This is a great asset for companies which must always innovate, but it may not favor teamwork, openness to the world… Many PhD students, I think, are isolated and do not know what their competitors do.”

High-tech start-ups: the new star system.

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America loves its heroes! Two recent events seem to show that after Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and the Hall of Fames in sport, high-tech entrepreneurship is creating its own star system:

– it began with Boston’s Kendall Square. See for example the Xconomy article: Entrepreneur Walk of Fame Opens in Kendall Square: Gates, Jobs, Kapor, Hewlett, Packard, Swanson, and Edison are Inaugural Inductees.
– it was followed by Stanford recent Engineering Heroes project. This one is a project only with a very long list of more than 60 nominees.

Well you could build your own list. I think Boston missed Robert Noyce. Stanford will have to decide on its initial winners. The value of such lists is obviously the role model effect it should induce.

Venture Capital: Art or Science?

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I just read the chapters related to venture capital in the book The Masters of Private Equity and Venture Capital. These are the chapters 7 to 11 built from interviews of:
– Garth Saloner, Stanford Professor
– Bill Draper, founder of Draper Richards and of Sutter Hill
– Richard Kramlich, founder of NEA
– Steven Lazarus, founder of ARCH Venture Partners
– Pitch Johnson, founder of Asset Management Company

You may not know their names but Draper, Kramlich and Johnson are famous “grandfathers” of Silicon Valley venture capital. You may remember them if you read my chapter on the history of venture capital and the graph below shows how instrumental they were:

I have to admit my favorite chapter was about Pitch Johnson. (So if you are bored with my lengthy post at some point, jump to the Johnson chapter before quitting!) I had been in contact with him in the past when he sent me a great poster about the early history of the west coast VC. I had also quoted Johnson in my book; I quite liked what he had to say about entrepreneurship: “Entrepreneurs are the revolutionaries of our time.” And he had added: “Democracy works best when there is this kind of turbulence in the society, when those not well-off have a chance to climb the economic ladder by using brains, energy and skills to create new markets or serve existing markets better than their old competitors”

So is VC an art or a science? It is certainly not the only topic of this book but all contributors give their views on the question (and on a few other issues I will also mention).

Chapter 7 – Garth Saloner – The Entrepreneur and the Venture Capitalist

Saloner, a Stanford professor, gives an overview of what VC was and is about. He begins to say that VC is not what it was: “Rich and reliable returns no longer seem quite so dependable” (p. 143) so that VCs “Move toward a more conservative mix in their investment portfolios” because of “stressful market conditions”.

One of the sections of his chapter is called “Tough to predict”. “A VC cannot tell which of the many opportunities that cross the desk will be a 30 bagger”.  [A 30x multiple] … “And it can be nearly as difficult to predict which will return zero. These uncertainties drive the typical venture investor toward a home-run model.”

A third topic he studies follows another section title: “Whose side are you on anyway?” He answers by stating that the VC has a responsibility towards its LPs.  “The typical VC has every incentive to play long ball while many entrepreneurs will be simply happy to see their product come to market. And therefore the VC may be more aggressive.” The disparity in perspective is rooted in two aspects:
– the preferred stock structure which may induce fast exits if success does not seem to appear,
– the time and money, which gives an incentive to shut down if the time effort is too high.
“But even the success does not eliminate this tension: the entrepreneur may prefer a longer time horizon,” VCs need liquidity. The author is not sure that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell or Larry Ellison would have been given the opportunity with venture capitalists in control of the board room.

In conclusion the final section is called: a successful, if uneasy, marriage.

Chapter 8 – Bill Draper – Pioneer Investing

Bill Draper is indeed a pioneer of Venture Capital. You may read more about him on another post of mine, The Startup Game.

“Venture investors put their money into technologies that have not yet come to fruition, untested business ideas, undeveloped markets, and often entrepreneurs with virtually no track record. It is a pioneering from of investment.”

One of the sections here is “Seeing into the future”. “It is not a simple formula. Experiences become lessons, lessons become practices, and practices help us to succeed or fail.” … “It is essential to be quick footed, connected and on top of the latest technological changes in order to succeed.” … “The face of genius changes all the time.” Draper clearly explains the difficulty of the VC activity which makes it (according to my understanding of his views) more an art than a science.

Draper also talks about returns and money making: “Instead of worrying about their carry – in other words, their share of the profits, and fretting about the increase in value of their portfolio, some venture capitalists were more concerned about their fees, or the amount of money that they charged based on the funds under management. The rise of the megafunds and the Wall Street transaction mentality inevitably increased the competitive pressure on everyone.” … “The last thing they want to do is share deals, that is unfortunate because cooperation brings more talent to the table.” There is a nostalgia of the good old days, that have suffered from greediness.

But Draper is an optimist: “Skype was still in the idea phase, but it promised to be an amazing breakthrough. Zennstrom and Friis epitomize what it means to be a disruptive innovator.” … “Society would not be as advanced, interconnected and civilized as it is today were it not for the scores of talented venture capitalists who provided the platform for brilliant and passionate entrepreneurs to develop and nurture their world-changing ideas and innovative technologies.”

Chapter 9 – Richard Kramlich – Change for the Better

Kramlich is more on the science side (again according to my understanding). Let me quote him: “Some changes can be anticipated and planned for. Others are as surprising as a satellite that becomes space junk.” … “Our ability to anticipate, manage, respond to and capitalize on change has been an essential ingredient of our ability to grow into a firm that over our 32-year life span has helped 165 companies make initial stock sales.” … “We spend a considerable time managing change.” NEA has industry teams with experts such as a Nobel Laureate. “VCs are savvy risk takers, able to adapt to changing markets, they nurture creative ideas that might become huge successes. They know that sometimes they will fail completely.”

He also sees different approaches: “Some people are natural agents of change” … “Jim Clark is one of the rarest examples who operates almost exclusively on instinct.” … “A fast-change artist.”

He also added about Metcalfe, founder of 3com: “I had a difficult time telling if this was genius or folly”

And he concludes with “At NEA, [we] have developed some fairly sophisticated tools to avoid the dead ends. What are the holes where the incumbents are not playing? We have applied this sort of thinking to solar power, and have invested in 15 companies. But I am not sure their investments in the solar industry have been stellar… He also discusses greed (he claims NEA only takes 1% management fee vs. 2% on average) and the megafunds (he claims he can put in action billion-dollar funds in order to invest in companies such as Tele Atlas)

Kramlich definitely insists on systematic analysis, expertise and processes even if he recognizes intuition, art and guts play a role for others.

Chapter 10 – Steven Lazarus – Beyond the Ivory Tower

The roots of ARCH Venture Partners are unusual as Lazarus funds began in a university framework, which is why the author of the book summarizes this chapter with the comment “It is possible to systematically commercialize the research from university laboratories”

Lazarus is more humble. He describes ARCH as “an experiment designed to help commercialize laboratory research.” … “Systematically rummaging through university labs.” but he adds: “We made plenty of mistakes.” … “The techniques that have been so helpful to me might be helpful to anyone trying to manage an enterprise that embraces risk in order to grow companies and turn a profit.” … “The scouts also needed to be good judges of talent.” … “We launched ARCH as a technology incubator but the most successful investment turned out to be a company that had nothing to do with technology.”

One of the sections is “Facing the risks”. “We were identifying science literally at the site of inception. We faced three risks: technology, market and financing.” (Surprisingly he does not mention the people or team risks.)

Lazarus is also on the science side of venture capital but when you read between the lines, you may see some of the artistic features.

Chapter 11 – Pitch Johnson – Fostering Innovation

As I said above, this was my favorite chapter. “The crucial decisions must be made on the basis of inadequate information.” … “Back an entrepreneur without knowing if the idea is powerful, the market big enough and the management strong enough.” [About Amgen in which he invested] “The company must control variables, be able to replicate results, learn from mistakes, and incorporate new information. Beyond that, there was the human factor.”

“I have learnt the tools and techniques, the importance of working with the best people, perhaps the single most vital ingredient of success, I have learnt the pitfalls to avoid. With a lot of lessons over time, one has a good chance of backing the right people with the right ideas in the right markets.” … “The art of our business is to select only the best people with the strongest ideas. The people with drive, the ones who can execute, who can work with others.”

He has also a funny and critical (for him) anecdote: “As I rose in the ranks [of the company he first worked for], I was eligible for stock options. I got 42 shares. The founders each owned hundreds of thousands, I decided I needed to do something else.”

He also has quite a unique model of venture capital: he decided to quit VC and run his own money, more like a business angel. The main advantages: “Not the same time horizon. The luxury of patience.” He also criticizes some abuses: “VC has become a big money management business. AMC is just $60M. But since 2007, VC is back to basics: starting companies, find people, with breakthrough ideas. Whereas in the dot-com, it was quick-hitting with no intention of really innovating.” As an example, he claims he was an investor in Boole and Babbage for 30 years !!

“Many styles of entrepreneurs work. What counts is matching the right CEO with the particulars of the challenges facing a company. Informal or hierarchical styles, both work.” (He compared Tandem to Teradyne as examples of both styles.)

Art or Science? Clearly a lot of art, a lot of technique and know-how too. Clearly not an industry, but more a craft. And as we all known, craftsmen are just in-between artists and scientists.

Red Herring: the End!

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This is my final post on the old Red Herring magazines I had collected from a friend. It has been fun to read what people thought 10-15 years ago. You can have a look at them through my Red Herring tag.

The most striking “mistake” was clearly linked to the difficutly in predicting the future. Just have a look at the cover page of July 2001.

I am not sure nanotechnologies have changed the world and 10 years is eternity. At least by start-up metrics. Medicine, optics and materials science as mentioned by Jason Pontin below may not have experienced breaktroughs from nanotechnologies.

But honestly, what I liked the most was Anthony Perkins’ contribution in December 2001. “Its back to the good old days”.

So let just me expand why I liked it (by putting in bold fonts what I liked). Here is the text again:

***********************
Just before halloween, Red Herring held NDA, its annual CEO conference on the future of technology. Like the holiday it preceded, NDA started as a spooky affair. More than 400 industry insiders showed up at the spanking new St. Regis Hotel in Dana Point, California, with no idea what to expect. After all, the technology industries have suffered a relentless series of blows to the midsection, and the attendees’ first order of business was to look around and see who was left standing. By the time coffee had been served, however, such fears started to subside. Folks like Qualcomm president Paul Jacobs; Allegro Networks president, CEO, and chairman Dave House; chair of Edventures Esther Dyson; and cofounder of Integral Capital Partners Roger McNamee, were all happily strolling the hotel hallways.

By late afternoon the first day, an enthusiastic, even optimistic, attitude started to take hold. During the “Eggheads Unplugged” panel, which featured Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Eric Schmidt, the new CEO of Google; Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security; Tim Harris, president and CEO of Structural Genomix; and John Gage, chief researcher of Sun Microsystems, it was encouraging to hear these supergeeks riff on topics like nanotechnology, quantum computing, and other far-out innovations. [1] Almost suddenly, all was well again: our industry was still full of smart people talking about cool things.

At this point, Michael Schrage, codirector of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab eMarkets Initiative, was edging up to me and observing that technology industries were far from becoming “sunset” industries. “Everyone at this conference is speaking in terms of exponential growth,” Mr. Schrage said. “The only debate that is going on is whether we are going to grow at a rate of ten squared or ten to the eighth.” [2]

On the morning of the second day, I gave a presentation on the “Always-On Generation”. After explaining why I thought the economic growth curve associated with the Internet was still well in front of us, I ended with a slide titled, “What Great Entrepreneurs Are.” [3] First and foremost, I noted that the great entrepreneurs I know are focused. I talked about how Bill Gates had sensed, back in 1995, that he had to turn around the Microsoft battleship and begin focusing on the Internet. He knew that it was going to be such a Herculean task that he had to kick himself upstairs and take on the role of chief software architect to get the job done. I also recounted that when Steve Jobs took back the reins of Apple Computer, he consolidated the company’s product line from 85 different models to two clearly defined families of computers–one for professionals and another, colorful one for consumers.

The second virtue of great entrepreneurship, I explained, was cheapness. This is probably the skill we abandoned most dramatically during the Internet bubble era, when the idea of making a profit seemed the last thing on our agendas. “Michael Dell has built a multibillion dollar business based upon being cheap,” I observed. I also spoke about the virtues of competitiveness and imagination. Throughout my professional career, I have observed the world trying to compete with vigor against Bill Gates. In fact, as far as I am concerned, I noted, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, and Steve Case have made careers of trying to topple the king.

Finally, I talked about the fact that great entrepreneurs have a high tolerance for taking risks. To illustrate this point, I noted that the six blue-chip technology companies that had successfully made the transition to the Internet era–Apple, Cisco Systems, Dell Computer, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle–are still run by their original entrepreneurs. In essence, I believe that it takes the same aptitude for risk to point a large corporation in an entirely new direction as it does to start a company.

After finishing my talk, I felt strangely satisfied that my thoughts had been somewhat original. That was until I sauntered to the back of the room and sat next to Paul Deninger, Broadview International’s CEO and a Red Herring board member. “You know, Tony,” he said in his typical bottom-line style, “its amazing, but what you were just talking about is Entrepreneurship 101. And ironically it seems like we were all listening to these things for the first time!” This is when it occurred to me that somehow–magically–we were back to the good old days. Back to the basics. Back to the days when, as Steve Jobs used to observe, “overnight successes sure take a helluva long time.” When we have to work hard, we earn our glory. And, you know what? It sure feels great!
***********************

So here are my comments:

[1]: you need to be imaginative, nanotechnologies, quantum computing, and elsewhere in the 2001 issues, I read about Nanotechnologies again (including fullerene, gallium nitride) and nanotech start-ups (Nitronex, Zyvex, not to forget Nanosys; I am not sure where they are), Europe irising (in biotech. Really?), Robotics, including artificial intelligence, face analysis and recognition. Coming! We need to dream, do not get me wrong. But RH missed Google (just as I did) and probably the Web2.0.

[2] The only debate that is going on is whether we are going to grow at a rate of ten squared or ten to the eighth.” Well, aren’t we in a recession?. Too easy now that we know.

[3] But the piece I like the most is the back to basics, entrepreneurship 101: focus, competitiveness and imagination, cheapness, high tolerance for taking risks. This is what great entrepreneurs are about. Jobs, Gates, Ellison back then. Brin and Page today.

RIP RH!

How Aart has poisoned the EDA start-up ecosystem

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You know I have a special interest in EDA. One of the influential bloggers, John Cooley, on his DeepChip site gives a video crash course on a start-up ecosystem, how the companies are valued, why VCs invest or not. Clear and simple and sadly true, and funny video at the same time.

The title is provocative and unfair. Aart (de Geus) has not poisoned anything, but the industry he is in may be in trouble.

They Made It !

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They Made It! by Angelika Blendstrup is another book made of interviews of Silicon Valley actors. I had talked in the past about In the company of Giants, Once You’re Lucky, Betting it All, Founders at Work, but this one as a different angle.

The focus is about immigrants as the subtitle indicates: “How Chinese, French, German, Indian, Iranian, Israeli and other foreign born entrepreneurs contributed to high tech innovation in the Silicon Valley, the US and Overseas.” And the lessons are quite interesting.

The author summarizes on page 260 some characteristics of the people interviewed:
– High intelligence, often coupled with a great educational background
– A willingness to work hard, focus, determination and perseverance
– A vision for success in their professional careers and personal lives
– Curiosity and passion
– Love of family and a dedication to supporting it
– An often uncanny insight into themselves and others
– Belief in themselves
– Openness to emotional and intellectual growth
– A tolerance for, even a love of, risk and the ability to (quickly) recover from failure
– An appetite to collaborate
– Humility
– A desire to give back to society

I was particularly stricken by stories of people who moved and left everything behind. There is an element in entrepreneurship that someone told me this morning about: entrepreneurs know that they may lose everything (house, family) and they might not been afraid of such risks, sometimes because they have experienced it already and they know they can recover from it. This explains the passion, the dedication, and the ability to try.

Interviews after interview, you read about values, leadership, and openness to diversity, breaking barriers. I may not have learnt many new things but I liked the book very much, maybe just for the reason that it is another great illustration of what Silicon Valley values are and why immigrants have been so critical to the region.

Final detail, I did a simple analysis of origins of people interviewed:
France: 7
Israel: 5
India: 5
China: 3
Taiwan: 2
Iran: 2
Germany: 2
ROW: 5
Interesting to notice that France is highest despite it is not known for its entrepreneurship culture…

Steve Blank and Customer Development

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Although I had mentioned him in previous posts such as The Art of Selling and his Views on Entrepreneurship, I had never read Steve Blank’s until now. I just finished reading The Four Steps to the Epiphany and I must just say it is a great book.

I will explain into some details his theory but the main reason I love this book is how he explains why founders are critical in all the decisions of the early phases of a start-up. Not the usual “hire business people”, but “learn and become an expert until you reach your limits”. I should immediately add that it is not an easy book to read and certainly mostly useful to people in the process of launching a start-up or developing new products. His web site steveblank.com is also very informative, you will find tons of slides of his teachings on the web and I particularly recommend the list of books he suggests reading.

Steve Blank is famous worldwide (mea culpa for not mentioning him more before) for his theory on the Customer Developement. Whereas we all know that the high-tech world is not about technology (no it’s not; ideas and technologies are far from sufficient to explain this world), we have a tendency to focus on products (much more important than technologies) and markets (business vs. technology). But Steve Blank explains how products can be an illusion (if never sold to customers) and how markets can be extremely dangerous if not well understood; whereas what counts are the users of products, the people which make markets, i.e. the customers. He explains how important it is to interact with potential customers in an iterative manner (bottom-up) even before designing and developing the product, then while developing them and be careful about a top-bottom-only analysis of the markets.

This is one of his famous slides where he explains that Product Development in isolation is deathly and should be done in parallel with Customer Developement only. Start-ups do not need teams in Marketing, Sales or Business Development, but only two teams, in Product Development and Customer Development, each headed by one of the Founder(s)/CEO. Below is another detailed description of this process (also available online). Then when they become large, they can switch to the traditional models.

You should absolutely read this if you are in a start-up mode. This may help you avoid many (possibly deathly) mistakes.