Category Archives: Silicon Valley and Europe

The Immigrant, Factor of Creation

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Here was my last column in 2013 for Entreprise Romande, with a subject that is dear to me, the importance of migrants.

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The paths of innovation and entrepreneurship are paved with a myriad of dilemmas. Clayton Christensen a few years ago had explored the first topic in his Innovator’s Dilemma and last year Noam Wasserman has published the interesting Founder’s Dillemmas. The uncertainty of the market, youth vs. experience, disruptive vs. incremental innovation, the new vs. the established are just a few examples of these difficult choices. A more controversial and politically sensitive subject is the contribution of migrants and foreigners in the field of creation.

Just when he debate is growing in Europe as well as in Switzerland about the threat that would represent those who are different and come from elsewhere, it is perhaps worth remembering more positive elements about the importance of openness to outsiders. The Swiss history [1] reminds us that the watch industry is linked to the arrival of the Huguenots in the sixteenth century; a part of the textile industry in St. Gallen has its origin in England. There is also a French origin in the Basel chemical industry. Perhaps it interesting to recall that Christoph Blocher has distant German roots. But what about Nicolas Hayek, the savior of the watch industry, rocked by his Lebanese and French cultures.

Much further, Silicon Valley, the world champion of innovation and entrepreneurship, owes much to its migrants. Of course America is a land of pioneers, but the San Francisco area pushed the logic to an extreme. More than half of the entrepreneurs in this region are of foreign origin and for example Google, Yahoo, Intel had founders with foreign roots.

While Europe has a temptation of closing its doors due to its economic difficulties, in the United States, the Start-up Act 2.0 intends to streamline visas for foreigners and to regularize children of migrants to enable them to enter higher education. Japan was another major country for innovation a few decades ago nut it may have suffered from its low level of migration; the country is aging and has not really reinvented itself.

Switzerland is a land of migration, let us not forget it. This is one of its strengths. Today, the campus of EPFL and ETHZ have a great deal of students but also of researchers and teachers with foreign origin. The proportion increases much more if you focus on those who create businesses. For those who have received an entrepreneurial scholarship to EPFL, the proportion rises to 75% including 25 % of non-Europeans.

Would foreigners be more talented and creative? The answer is rather a larger experience of what is unknown and uncertain. Migrants have agreed to leave their homeland, sometimes leaving everything behind. And they know by experience that we can recover from this loss. They know well that it is always possible to start again and the fear of failure is reduced. He also learned to domesticate novelty. It should be added that a migrant has less access to established circles and is stuck by “glass ceilings”. They must often build they destiny. From this point of view, they do not take the jobs of anyone, they create new opportunities, that will become beneficial to others!

[1] http://histoire-suisse.geschichte-schweiz.ch/industrialisation-suisse.html

The promise of technology. Disappointing?

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After reading the great New Yorker article about Silicon Valley and politics, I searched for “Silicon Valley” on the magazine web site and found two contrasting articles:

NewYorker-2000

– the first one is a kind of introduction to my previous post, it was also written by George Packer (clearly a great and insightful writer) in 2011 and is about Peter Thiel, the famous libertarian entrepreneur and investor: NO DEATH, NO TAXES – The libertarian futurism of a Silicon Valley billionaire.
– the second one is much older and is about the early days of Google and Internet search: SEARCH AND DEPLOY by Michael Specter.

They are kind of contradictory because the second one is optimistic about what technology can solve (Google greatly improved our access to knowledge) whereas Packer shows Thiel’s pessimism with the outcome of technology even if he has great hope in it. In fact as mentioned in the previous article about SV and politics, he belongs to the group of people distrusting politics to the point that he believes technology might / must be the alternative.

Let me begin with the optimistic first: in 2000, Google was already seen as the winner of the Internet search race. Even if it did not have yet its business model, Google solved better our search on the Internet. Page and Brin did it by finding a better mathematics algorithm, the PageRank system based on the popularity and frequency of reference of web pages. As a funny side result, Google had less queries than other sites on porn: “About ten per cent of Google queries are for pornography. The figure is lower than that of most other search engines. This reflects the demographics of the people who use the search engine, but perhaps it also demonstrates one of Google’s obvious failings: porn sites are sought out by millions of Internet users but are rarely linked to prominent Web pages. Without links, even the most popular page is invisible.”

PeterThiel-NewYorker-2011
The credo of Thiel’s venture-capital firm: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Photograph by Robert Maxwell.

It’s been known that Thiel has been disappointed with high-tech innovation. Just read again my 2010 post, Technology = Salvation. I think you should read Packer’s article if you liked (or even if you did not) his Change the World. Both articles show the power and limits of these visionary people and the sometimes scary vision of technology vs. politics. There is something of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in all this. He brilliantly shows the strange nature of these people (a high concentration of Asperger syndromes and dyslexia – apparently two rather high frequency features of entrepreneurs). Again just short notes (you have to read it to see the broadness of the topics:

“Thiel believes that education is the next bubble in the U.S. economy. He has compared university administrators to subprime-mortgage brokers, and called debt-saddled graduates the last indentured workers in the developed world, unable to free themselves even through bankruptcy. Nowhere is the blind complacency of the establishment more evident than in its bovine attitude toward academic degrees: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education has become a very expensive insurance policy—proof, Thiel argues, that true innovation has stalled. In the midst of economic stagnation, education has become a status game, “purely positional and extremely decoupled” from the question of its benefit to the individual and society. It’s easy to criticize higher education for burdening students with years of debt, which can force them into careers, like law and finance, that they otherwise might not have embraced. And a university degree has become an unquestioned prerequisite in an increasingly stratified society. But Thiel goes much further: he dislikes the whole idea of using college to find an intellectual focus. Majoring in the humanities strikes him as particularly unwise, since it so often leads to the default choice of law school. The academic sciences are nearly as dubious—timid and narrow, driven by turf battles rather than by the quest for breakthroughs. Above all, a college education teaches nothing about entrepreneurship. Thiel thinks that young people—especially the most talented ones—should establish a plan for their lives early, and he favors one plan in particular: starting a technology company.”

Always consistent with his thoughts, he “came up with the idea of giving fellowships to brilliant young people who would leave college and launch their own startups. Thiel moves fast: the next day, at TechCrunch Disrupt, an annual conference in San Francisco, he announced the Thiel Fellowships: twenty two-year grants, of a hundred thousand dollars each, to people under the age of twenty. The program made news, and critics accused Thiel of corrupting youth into chasing riches while truncating their educations. He pointed out that the winners could return to school at the end of the fellowship. This was true, but also somewhat disingenuous. No small part of his goal was to poke a stick in the eye of top universities and steal away some of their best.”

I am not sure I follow him too much (I am just too normal), for example in his quest for eternity, but I understand many of his visions. He is as much a dreamer as a doer, his fund had mixed results, but he is with Elon Musk (one of his his co-founders in PayPal) among the people who push “trying” to the limits without being afraid of failing.

Silicon Valley and (a)politics – Change the World

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My colleague Andrea just mentioned to me this exceptional article about Silicon Valley and its lack of interest, not to say distrust, for politics. It’s been published in the New Yorker in May 2013 and is entitled: Change the World – Silicon Valley transfers its slogans—and its money—to the realm of politics by George Packer.

130527_r23561_p233“In Silicon Valley, government is considered slow, staffed by mediocrities, and ridden with obsolete rules and inefficiencies.” Illustration by Istvan Banyai.

All this is not so far from a recent post I published: The Capital Sins of Silicon Valley. George Packer’s analysis is however profound, subtle and quite fascinating. I will not analyze the article, you have to read it even if it is a vrey long article, and to encourage you in doing so, here are just five quotes:

– “People in tech, when they talk about why they started their company, they tend to talk about changing the world,” Green said. “I think it’s actually genuine. On the other hand, people are just completely disconnected from politics. Partly because the operating principles of politics and the operating principles of tech are completely different.” Whereas politics is transactional and opaque, based on hierarchies and handshakes, Green argued, technology is empirical and often transparent, driven by data.

– Morozov, who is twenty-nine and grew up in a mining town in Belarus, is the fiercest critic of technological optimism in America, tirelessly dismantling the language of its followers. “They want to be ‘open,’ they want to be ‘disruptive,’ they want to ‘innovate,’ ” Morozov told me. “The open agenda is, in many ways, the opposite of equality and justice. They think anything that helps you to bypass institutions is, by default, empowering or liberating. You might not be able to pay for health care or your insurance, but if you have an app on your phone that alerts you to the fact that you need to exercise more, or you aren’t eating healthily enough, they think they are solving the problem.”

– a system of “peer production” could be less egalitarian than the scorned old bureaucracies, in which “a person could achieve the proper credentials and thus social power whether they came from wealth or poverty, an educated family or an ignorant one.” In other words, “peer networks” could restore primacy to “class-based and purely social forms of capital,” returning us to a society in which what really matters is whom you know, not what you could accomplish. (…) Silicon Valley may be the only Americans who don’t like to advertise the fact if they come from humble backgrounds. According to Kapor, they would then have to admit that someone helped them along the way, which goes against the Valley’s self-image.

– “There is this complete horseshit attitude, this ridiculous attitude out here, that if it’s new and different it must be really good, and there must be some new way of solving problems that avoids the old limitations, the roadblocks. And with a soupçon of ‘We’re smarter than everybody else.’ It’s total nonsense.”

– “This is one of the things nobody talks about in the Valley,” Andreessen told me. Trying to get a start-up off the ground is “absolutely terrifying. Everything is against you.” Many young people wilt under the pressure. As a venture capitalist, he hears pitches from three thousand people a year and funds just twenty of them. “Our day job is saying no to entrepreneurs and crushing their dreams,” he said. Meanwhile, “every entrepreneur has to pretend in every interaction that everything is going great. Every party you go to, every recruiter, every press interview—‘Oh, everything’s fantastic!’—and, inside, your soul is just being chewed apart, right? It’s sort of like everybody’s fake happy all the time.”

The Dream of Silicon Valley

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This is my translation (well Google translation) of a very good article I read in newspapers La Tribune de Genève (pdf here) and 24 heures (pdf here). I am not sure I have the rights to do such a transaltion. I will do it the Google was and hopefully the news papers will not complain…

If you do not want to read it all, here are just two short quotes: “Some explain the excitement that prevails here because of a feeling of urgency, says Christian Simm. We must go quickly, people know they cannot work 80 hours a week for twenty years.” and
“You want to know the secret of Silicon Valley? asks Fadi Bishara, head of the incubator Blackbox. Failure is not an issue. It is completely accepted. It is even considered an apprenticeship.”

The Dream of Silicon Valley
Can the Lake Geneva area reproduce the ecosystem of the U.S. technology hub ?
by Renaud Bournoud

Often imitated, never equaled. The famous ecosystem of Silicon Valley, near San Francisco, is one of the most dynamic regions of the world. The success stories of Google, Apple and Facebook continue to fascinate, even on the Lake Geneva. But on paper, this Eldorado for innovation has much in common with our region. In a similar geographic area, a large bean sixty kilometers long, the two countries are ranked in the world’s most successful regions. If Silicon Valley is based on the prestigious universities of Stanford and Berkeley, the Lake Geneva can count on the EPFL, the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne or the IMD, the High School of Management. In both cases, the density of highly qualified people is high. Even daily commuters from Silicon Valley experience the discomfort that we know well . They also wait for hours in traffic jams. U.S. Highway 101, which irrigates the valley is as congested as the A1, between Lausanne and Geneva. Housing is also a concern that we share with them. The real estate prices are well above the U.S. average and have nothing to envy to those on Lake Geneva. So what are the ingredients that make Silicon Valley so special?

SV-24h

Demographic factors

A century ago, the orange groves reigned as kings over this corner of California. Now the land has nearly four million people. More broadly, the population of the San Francisco Bay is the size of that of Switzerland. The presence of reputable universities brings a lot of talent, as well as the attraction of the region. Silicon Valley Community Foundation considers that 60% of the engineers were born abroad, many of whom are from Asia. But the valley also attracts many Americans. “Here we are at the extreme west of the United States. We cannot go further, says Christian Simm, founder of Swissnex (note: the Swiss Agency for Promotion of Science and Innovation) in San Francisco. People who consider Boston too quiet come here to create. Because everything seems possible.” This density of great talent pool is ideal for company recruitment. A startup like Square, active in payment systems, could recruit 600 programmers in less than four years. This would not necessarily be feasible in the Lake Geneva region. These people have often come alone and can concentrate fully on their work. “Some explain the excitement that prevails here because of a feeling of urgency, says Christian Simm. We must go quickly, people know they cannot work 80 hours a week for twenty years.”

Cultural factors

A they arrived alone in Silicon Valley, people are quite willing to meet others, creating a culture of networking. Many networking events are regularly organized, like the Start Up Weekends. They also exist here, but in smaller proportions, simply because the population and the number of start-ups are lower. “It makes it easy to find a partner to build a startup,” says Ahmed Siddiqui, one of the organizers of Start Up Weekends Bay Area. “Here the world lives around the field of technology , explains Alexandre Gonthier, the boss of PayWithMyBank in Redwood City. I met my partner at the playground where I watched my children.” Not only can we can find a future partner in the sandbox, it is also easy to cross the pundits of Silicon Valley at random from a barbecue party. They are available and are ready to play mentors for younger people. “It is not as easy to meet bosses in Europe … Unless they learn that you are installed in Silicon Valley. There, the doors open,” notes Alexandre Gonthier. Contacts are natural, and the mentality towards failure also has a role. “You want to know the secret of Silicon Valley? asks Fadi Bishara, head of the incubator Blackbox. Failure is not an issue. It is completely accepted. It is even considered an apprenticeship.” And if the project does not fail, it will soon be on the market. “The minimum viable product” is the leitmotif of the Silicon Valley. “We need to create something simple that you can use right away,” says Solomon Dykes, the founder of the start-up Dotdoud in San Francisco. “I would add that the idea is not very important, Fadi Bishara continues. Googje invented nothing, there were already search engines. What matters is the “packaging”, how the project is sold.” It’s the reason why storytelling is used a lot to sell. These stories also serve to develop an entrepreneurial spirit. Many myths have grown from Silicon Valley. There is the famous story about the birth of startups in garages. Like, for exampl , Google, which had rented a garage, whereas it had already raised $ 1 million.

Financial factors

Good idea or not, nothing is possible without money. The region of Silicon Valley attracts 46% of venture capital in the United States, according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. This happens especially much earlier in the development of projects than here.” If, after a year , the start -up has not found funding , we believe that we need to move on,” adds Jeff Burton , director of Skydesk , an incubator located on the Berkeley campus . “For us, the institutional money comes much later, said Joao Antonio Brinca, representative of BCV board at the Foundation for Technological Innovation in Lausanne. Financing through venture capital funds typically occurs between the fifth and seventh year of the project life. “The sums involved are not the same. A young company of Lake Geneva can hopee to raise between 300,000 and 600,000 francs for its first round of funding. In Silicon Valley it is at least twice. So there is a gap between the first efforts of startups to exit the academic world and the interests of investors . This longer period may explain the difficulty of transforming research into marketable products. Another advantage of Silicon Valley is its close proximity maintained between universities and private firms. In this regard, the Lake Geneva is still lagging behind. But it would be wrong to say that nothing is done about it. EPFL has worked in recent years to attract firms in the area of innovation, so that they mingle with the start-ups. But again, the structures of the same type that abound in Silicon Valley are favored by the scale. The density of start-ups produces a unique emulation world. Also keep in mind the economy of scale to explain this difference. A U.S. start -up happens in a domestic market of 320 million potential customers. In Switzerland, an emerging company has to deal with a much smaller market, divided into three languages and twenty- six cantons.

This article was produced as part of a tour organized by BCV for ten young Vaudois.

The Startup Kids – a film that any wannabe founder should watch!

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Movies may become a better way to communicate about start-ups & entrepreneurship than books or blogs. It’s something Neil Rimer had told me when I published my book. It is true there has been a number of new features in fiction (The Social Network, Jobs) and non-fiction (SomethingVentured) recently without a need to mention old stuff such as Triumph of the Nerds Silicon Valley Pirates and special events on television such as PBS.

Startup Kids belong to this new trend and it is an interesting (and fun) document. You may watch the trailer here and I will quote a few entrepreneurs thereafter. The document had been mentioned to me by colleagues (merci Corine ) who showed it to me, including the very good blog article of Sébastien Flury: The Startup Kids – a film that any wannabe founder should watch! (whom title I used, nice Sébastien 🙂 )

What’s entrepreneurship?

StartupKids-Houston
Drew Houston, Dropbox: “It’s like jumping out of a cliff and having to build your own parachute”

StartupKids-Segerstrale
Kristian Segerstrale, Playfish: “An entrepreneur is a person who dares to have a dream that not many people have and even more important dares to chase it, put their money where their mouth is and their time and their career and dares to take the risk to going out there to realize that vision.”

StartupKids-Ljung
Alexandre Ljung, SoundCloud (from Sweden and based in Berlin and San Francisco): “I did not have the typical entrepreneur background, […] but in hindsight I was very focused on projects so I was very entrepreneurial but not in a business sense.”

In European Founders at Work, his co-founder Eric Wahlforss states “I think we could have easily done this in one year faster if we would have been a little bit more bold and thinking a little bit more in terms of scale early on. We started out very small, had almost no money at all, and a very small team. I think we could have been bolder. […] and running with a bigger vision from the start.” And then “Do it.” It’s the best decision I’ve ever done in my whole life. […] And I was studying engineering as well, and I had one hundred classmates. And I know that almost zero of them actually went on to start a company, which is kind of crazy because I know a lot of them have good ideas. But none of them quite felt that they were able to pull it off.

Luck is an important topic in the movie

Segerstrale again: “Successful start-ups need a lot of things, they need a great idea, they need a great team, they need to be there at the right time, they need the right level of funding, and they need a lot of luck.”

StartupKids-Draper
Tim Draper, founder and investor, DFJ: “There is a lot of luck in the success of all the companies which have succeeded. You need a lot of luck, there were 25 search engines funded before Google was funded. There was Friendster and LinkedIn and MySpace and about 50 others before facebook became the big winner in that area.” [And it was the same with computer companies in the 80s!]

StartupKids-Klein
Finally do not miss Zach Klein (founder of Vimeo) in his beautiful wood cabin which reminds me of Thoreau’s Walden.

Stanford will invest in companies founded by students

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“The prestigious American university Stanford will now invest in start-ups.” Thus begins an article in the newspaper Le Monde. The author, Jerome Marin, is rather negative about this decision, as the following quote shows: “The confusion is fueled even at the top of the university: the president has close ties with several giants of Silicon Valley, including Google as it is a member of the Board.” Without trying to argue, I think the reporter is misled.

Stanford va investir

But before I give you my point of view , I’d like to mention that I looked for other articles related to the topic, I found at least two :
– That of TechCrunch, close in spirit to Le Monde’s one, Stanford University Is Going To Invest In Student Startups Like A VC Firm. The article is also critical but I think better informed… and it also deals with the tension between the academic and business worlds. “That tension between academia and industry was highlighted this past spring when a number of students dropped out of school to start Clinkle”.
with references to another New Yorker article.
– The press release by Stanford University, StartX, Stanford University and Stanford Hospital & Clinics announce $3.6M grant and venture fund. If you read the statement carefully, it is about a gift from Stanford to StartX and a joint Stanford-StartX fund. StartX is an accelerator created by Stanford students and I understand that the University therefore supports this initiative. There is no mention, however, of a fund managed by Stanford as a VC fund.

The reason I think the reporter is mistaken is when he says that “Stanford will invest in companies created by its students”. As if it was new. Even if I agree that the stakes taken in start-ups in exchange for licensing of intellectual property is not an investment per se, Stanford still has acquired stakes in more than 170 of its spin-offs in the past . In addition the Stanford endowment has invested on an individual basis in many start-ups in the past (not to mention in many VC funds). For example, I found in a database I am building on Stanford-related companies, that Stanford invested in Aion (1984), Convergent (1980), Gemfire (1995), Metreo (2000), Tensilica (1998). Website LinkSv mentions Stanford invested in 143 companies. [I am aware there might be some confusion between investor and shareholder, so the topic remains somehow confusing].

Finally, in the 2000s, the Office of Technology Transfer at Stanford managed two funds, the Birdseed Fund (for amounts of $5k to $25k) and the Gap Fund ($25k to $250k) as shown the 2002 OTL annual report.

It is not at all new that Stanford invests in its start-ups. There has also always been tension, let’s do not deny it either. A little-known example of Cisco-Stanford early relationship. So nothing new under the sun. But you will not be surprised if I add that the overall result seems (is) extremely positive for all stakeholders, the university (including in its academic dimension), individuals, start-ups and the economy in general.

The Capital Sins of Silicon Valley

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People who are close to me are sometimes (often?) tired of my enthusiasm for Silicon Valley. It is well known that the creative energy in innovation is quite unique and the resulting value creation pretty huge. This energy is contagious and as Steve Jobs said: “[There are] two or three reasons. You have to go back a little in history. I mean this is where the beatnik happened in San Francisco. It is a pretty interesting thing. This is where the hippy movement happened. This is the only place in America where Rock‘n’roll really happened. Right? Most of the bands in this country, Bob Dylan in the 60’s, I mean they all came out of here. I think of Joan Baez to Jefferson Airplane to the Grateful Dead. Everything came out of here, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, everybody. Why is that? You’ve also had Stanford and Berkeley, two awesome universities drawing smart people from all over the world and depositing them in this clean, sunny, nice place where there’s a whole bunch of other smart people and pretty good food. And at times a lot of drugs and all of that. So they stayed. There’s a lot of human capital pouring in. Really smart people. People seem pretty bright here relative to the rest of the country. People seem pretty openminded here relative to the rest of the country. I think it’s just a very unique place and it’s got a track record to prove it and that tends to attract more people. I give a lot of credit to the universities, probably the most credit of anything to Stanford and Berkeley.” A paradise? That’s a nice question! I will try to address the maybe lesser-known dark sides of the region.

google-offices
All those office perks come with strings attached. Reuters/Erin Siegal
from Those cool Silicon Valley offices? More like secretly evil empires

Single-minded devotion to self-interest

The topic is not new. In 1984, the authors of Silicon Valley Fever devoted two chapters to the difficulties of the region, one is entitled “Lifestyles” and the other “Troubles in paradise”. On page 184, they say: “In the 1980s, cracks began to appear” and concluded (page 202) that “perhaps the greatest threat of all is the single-minded devotion to self-interest at the expense of the common good. ”

I think this is the most serious problem in Silicon Valley. In a recent article in the Nouvel Observateur, The hidden face of the oligarchs of the net, Natacha Tatu is critical of the wealthy entrepreneurs who “sometimes become rich against the American interests.” In fact, the large technology companies (Intel, Oracle, Google, Apple, etc.) have made real war chests outside the U.S. and prefer not to repatriate them to avoid paying the taxes they consider excessive. “The effective tax rate of the high-tech giants was only 16% in 2011. At this game, the champion is Amazon, which taxes amounted to only 3.5% of its earnings in 2011, followed by Xerox (7.3%) and Apple (9.8%)”, according to BFM TV in How Google, Apple & Co use tax havens. Furthermore, “in 2004, George W. Bush, magnanimous, had given such a “tax holliday” – the repatriated profits were taxed at only 5% instead of 35% -, that HP took the opportunity to repatriate $16 billion, IBM 12 billion, Intel 7.6 billion, Oracle 3.3 billion, and Microsoft 1 billion.” This tax selfishness may partly explain the poor infrastructure (public transportation, low quality highways, schools, health services); this is a typical American vice that is not unique to Silicon Valley. The fact remains that the gap between the wealth of the region and poverty in the public system is more extreme.

A very expensive area with large inequalities

I quote now Chris Schrader in What’s The Dark Side Of Silicon Valley? “The amount of wealth in the area has driven up home prices near the places where the jobs are to astronomical levels.” If we add the cost of health and education, living in Silicon Valley is a nightmare if you do not have comfortable income. I do not even talk about the “working poors” whose situation is more difficult admitting that their situation is legal. Not to mention either that much of the production is outsourced to emerging countries where working conditions are even more difficult. Needless to return to the example of Foxconn in China that provides the bulk of Apple products.

Workaholics

This is known. In Silicon Valley, people work a lot. Not just for the money, no doubt, but the material considerations seem to be the only common concern to everybody. This is probably the consequence of this devotion to self-interest as much as of the cost of living. In order to pay for home, health care and education, you have to work a lot. But it goes further, and this is probably linked to the Protestant ethics and culture as well as to the pursuit of wealth that startups give hope to. Social life is sacrificed and I remember that many students at Stanford thought only of their education, which is a little sad…

This geek culture does not help in making Silicon Valley a balanced society. Discrimination and inequality remain strong. Noyce, the founder of Intel, was afraid of the unions and thought their arrival in a company were killing business. Undeclared work exists and working conditions are not nearly as idyllic as is sometimes described. More simply, the behaviors are often arrogant, hypocritical and superficial.

A deteriorated quality of life

The authors of Silicon Valley Fever mention some negative consequences of the points above: the lack of free time has obviously negative impact on family life, which is sacrificed at the altar of hard work. Little vacation, little curiosity too. In addition to degraded life conditions related to stress and a high divorce rate, these financial constraints induce a struggling transportation system since people generally work far away from home. Traffic jams are so unreasonable that Chris Schrader said, “I have to establish my schedule based on commute traffic which typically has me out of the house well before 7 am and many times back home by about 8pm. Leaving work at 5pm simply doesn’t make sense, because I would get home at the exact same time if I left at 7pm.” I’m not even talking about public transportation which is almost non-existent compared to European cities or even the metropolitan areas on the East Coast of the United States.

Security is not such an important topic in the Bay Area, but there are significant pockets of insecurity in East Palo Alto and Oakland. I’ll let you see the picture I took a few years ago. Again this is a more general American issue.

DSC00860

A poor socio-cultural life

Contrary to the statements by Steve Jobs I quoted earlier, Silicon Valley does not shine by its cultural life. Few major artists (compared to the wealth of the region). Athens, Rome, Florence in the distant past or Paris, London, Vienna and New York today did much better at their peak. No major museum in the region. No major figure in the political or social life despite two major universities. If you go to New York, Washington, Chicago or Los Angeles, I’m pretty sure that you’ll find a richer cultural life.

A herd mentality

I am far from having a complete list of negative elements in the region, but I will finish with a point that certainly creates a lot of frustration for innovators and creators. The fashions and trends are so strong that it is difficult to express oneself or worse succeed if one swims against the current. This “herd mentality” implies that one rarely listens to those who come up with ideas seemingly farfetched. Even the Google founders had struggled several months to convince anyone. More recently Elon Musk dit not use for Tesla Motors the usual Silicon Valley investors to finance his dream of electric vehicles; however, he has become the latest darling of the region. In the late 90s, it was the dotcom bubble, today, you need to be in social media. Innovation is much broader, but the money is flowing though in dozens of similar and often less innovative projects… Employees in start-ups follow the same trends and have no attachment or loyalty to their employers. This has probably some good sides (employees can negotiate for example, companies need to do their best to retain talent), but the superficiality of social relations in general can be problematic.

I do not in any way deny my enthusiasm for Silicon Valley which remains in my mind one of the most dynamic and creative regions in the world. I found inspiration and enthusiasm at critical moments of my life and the beauty of the surrounding nature, the enthusiasm (even if artificial) of the population and the sweetness of life (if you can afford it) make the region much enjoyable and exciting. It does not mean it is a paradise and there is clearly room for improvement.

In Innovation Quest, Regions Seek Critical Mass

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Very good article by the MIT technology review about technology clusters: In Innovation Quest, Regions Seek Critical Mass. Nothing really new, but it shows again and again how difficult it is to build such clusters and to promote an innovation culture. I just extract a few quotes:

“Clusters exist—it’s empirically proven,” Yasuyuki Motoyama, a senior scholar at the Kauffman Foundation, told me. “But that doesn’t mean governments can create one.”

The problem for governments is that they often try to define where and when innovation will occur. Some attempt to pick and fund winning companies. Such efforts have rarely worked well, says Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School. Governments can play a role, he says, but they should limit themselves mostly to “setting the table”: create laws that don’t penalize failed entrepreneurs, reduce taxes, and spend heavily on R&D. Then get out of the way.

But can entrepreneurs succeed in creating clusters where governments have had so much difficulty? “The conflict now is between two logics on how to create an ecosystem,” says Fiona Murray, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School, who consults as a kind of therapist to clusters, including London’s TechCity. One is “a government logic that says it’s too important to leave to entrepreneurs, and that you that need specialized inputs, like a technology park.” The other is “purely focused on people and their networks.” Murray believes the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Governments are good at organizing but poor at leading.

I will finsih by reminding you the power of SV in the cluster leadership…

WinnerTakesAll

AnnaLee Saxenian, Migration, Silicon Valley, and Entrepreneurship.

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Shame on me! How is it possible I mention so little AnnaLee Saxenian in this blog, as well as the importance of migrants in entrepreneurship? I had shortly mentioned Regional Advantage in Silicon Valley – more of the same?, but this was more about the openness of Silicon Valley culture and why it did a better job than the Boston area.

It might be because migration was a big feature of my book and nothing new came out thereafter even if the topic is of utmost importance. So let me address the topic of Immigrants again now. In her second book, published in 2006, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy Saxenian analyzed the importance of migrants in high-tech entrepreneurship, both for the USA and for the countries of origin of these migrants.

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In a related paper, she had written: “In the United States, discussions of the immigration of scientists and engineers have focused primarily on the extent to which foreign-born professionals displace native workers. The view from sending countries, by contrast, has been that the emigration of highly skilled personnel to the United States represents a big economic loss, a brain drain. Neither view is adequate in today’s global economy. Far from simply replacing native workers, foreign-born engineers are starting new businesses and generating jobs and wealth at least as fast as their U.S. counterparts. And the dynamism of emerging regions in Asia and elsewhere now draws skilled immigrants homeward. Even when they choose not to return home, they are serving as middlemen linking businesses in the United States with those in distant regions.” [Brain Circulation: How High-Skill Immigration Makes Everyone Better Off – 2002 – http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2002/12/winter-immigration-saxenian] In the end, she added: “Essentially, the new argonauts are people who have learned the Silicon Valley model, usually by doing graduate work in the U.S. and getting absorbed into the Silicon Valley boom. They marinated in the Silicon Valley culture and learned it. This really began in the late ‘80s for the Israelis and Taiwanese, and not until the late ‘90s or even the beginning of the ‘00s for the Indians and Chinese. They began to realize that they could take advantage of their own personal networks in their home countries to provide skill that was scarce in the Valley, and that they could even go home and start businesses there that would tap their old networks. Usually, they were going home and tapping their undergraduate colleagues or their friends from the military, in the case of Israel. They knew and they understood how to work the institutions and the culture of those places, often the language too, better than anyone else in the world.”

From the New Argonauts, I will take only two small paragraphs: “Graduating classes from the elite engineering program at National Taiwan University, for example, came to the United States in the 1980s, as did a majority of engineering and computer science graduates from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. Technical universities from smaller countries like Ireland and Israel also report large proportions of graduates leaving to study in the United States, although their numbers are too small to show up in the aggregate data. [Page 50]

Now the depressing argument! “The technical elite in countries like France and Japan move automatically into high-status positions at the top of the large corporations or the civil service. They have little incentive to study or work abroad, and often face significant opportunity costs if they do. As a result, relatively few pursue graduate education in the United States, and those who do often return home directly after graduation. Those who end up in Silicon Valley for a period are not likely to gain access to capital, professional opportunities, or respect when they return home.” [Page 333]

Saxenian has a long history on the topic. She began in 1999 when she published Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs. In two related studies, Saxenian and colleagues had a much deeper quantitative analysis. These were America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs in 2007 by Vivek Wadhwa, AnnaLee Saxenian, Ben Rissing, and Gary Gereffi; it was updated in 2012 in America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs: – Then and Now written by Vivek Wadhwa, AnnaLee Saxenian and F. Daniel Siciliano.

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There is one table I had used in my book which I found striking: Europe has many Silicon Valley migrants as shown below. But we have not been capable (yet) of using them fruitfully as Asia did. We only begin…
Europe sees the value of migration (still only one way, attracting talent) and hopefully we will benefit from accepting the lessons…

Venture Capital in Europe and in the USA

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A very short note on an excellent presentation by Jean-David Chamboredon, partner with ISAI fund, entitled Funding Innovation in Europe. I particularly liked two slides that show the success rate of investment in a start-up, and the other one addressing a subject that is dear to me, the comparison of VC in Europe and the USA. Thank you to my colleague Marie-Laure for mentioning this study have me 🙂

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