Tag Archives: Silicon Valley

Technology billionaires in 2013

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In 2007, I had made the same exercise, i.e. extract from the Forbes billionaire list, the ones who had a link with technology. I found by accident the 2013 Forbes list, and did the same exercise. Again the USA dominates and the word is weak. Europe has 8 whereas the USA has 63…

What’s new from the 2007 Technology Billionaires is the new comers, the web2.0 winners from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Groupon, not to forget GoDaddy!

2013-new billionaires-sma
Top: the Facebook billionaires. Bottom: founders of Linkedin, Twitter, Groupon, GoDaddy and finally Laurene Powell Jobs.

Also, average age is 57 but Internet billionaires’ age is 46!

# Name Origin Company Field Wealth ($B) Age
2 Bill Gates USA Microsoft Software 67 57
5 Larry Ellison USA Oracle Software 43 68
19 Jeff Bezos USA Amazon.com Internet 25.2 49
20 Larry Page USA Google Internet 23 39
21 Sergey Brin USA Google Internet 22.8 39
49 Michael Dell USA Dell Hardware 15.3 48
51 Steve Ballmer USA Microsoft Software 15.2 56
53 Paul Allen USA Microsoft Software 15 60
66 Mark Zuckerberg USA Facebook Internet 13.3 28
94 Ernesto Bertarelli CH Merck Serono Biotech 11 47
98 Laurene Powell Jobs USA Apple Hardware 10.7 49
122 Hasso Plattner D SAP Software 8.9 69
123 Hansjoerg Wyss CH Synthes Medical devices 8.7 78
123 Pierre Omidyar USA Ebay Internet 8.7 45
138 Eric Schmidt USA Google Internet 8.2 57
145 Patrick Soon-Shiong USA Abraxis Pharmaceuticals 8 61
154 James Goodnight USA SAS Software 7.7 70
156 Klaus Tschira D SAP Software 7.5 72
179 Xavier Niel F Free Internet 6.6 45
182 Dietmar Hopp D SAP Software 6.5 72
262 David Duffield USA Peoplesoft Software 4.8 72
316 Gordon Moore USA Intel Hardware 4.1 84
353 Dustin Moskovitz USA Facebook Internet 3.8 28
353 John Sall USA SAS Software 3.8 64
363 Jeffrey Skoll USA Ebay Internet 3.7 48
376 Barbara P. Johnson USA Johnson & Johnson Medical devices 3.6 76
437 Reid Hoffman USA LinkedIn Internet 3.1 45
437 Alain Merieux F Biomerieux Pharmaceuticals 3.1 75
503 Ronda Stryker USA Stryker Corp. Medical devices 2.8 58
503 Andy v. Bechtolsheim USA/D Google Internet 2.8 57
527 John Doerr USA KPCB Venture capital 2.7 61
527 Elon Musk USA Tesla Motors Hardware 2.7 41
554 Marc Benioff USA Salesforce.com Software 2.6 48
554 Jack Dangermond USA ESRI Software 2.6 67
554 Phillip Frost USA Key Pharma, Ivax Pharmaceuticals 2.6 76
554 David Sun USA Kingston Technology Hardware 2.6 61
554 John Tu USA Kingston Technology Hardware 2.6 72
613 Mark Cuban USA Broadcast.com Internet 2.4 54
641 Ray Dolby USA Dolby Laboratories Hardware 2.3 80
641 Ralph Dommermuth D United Internet Internet 2.3 49
670 Michael Moritz USA Sequoia Venture capital 2.2 58
670 Eduardo Saverin USA/Bra Facebook Internet 2.2 30
736 Sean Parker USA Facebook Internet 2 33
785 Romesh T. Wadhwani USA Aspect Software 1.95 65
792 Meg Whitman USA Ebay Internet 1.9 56
831 Hans-Werner Hector D SAP Software 1.8 73
831 Thomas Siebel USA Siebel Software 1.8 60
882 David Filo USA Yahoo Internet 1.7 46
882 Henry Samueli USA Broadcom Hardware 1.7 58
882 David Cheriton USA/Can Google Internet 1.7 61
922 Kavitark Ram Shriram USA Google Venture capital 1.65 56
931 Craig McCaw USA McCaw Telecom Telecom 1.6 63
931 Pat Stryker USA Stryker Corp. Medical devices 1.6 56
931 Peter Thiel USA Paypal, Facebook Internet 1.6 45
965 Irwin Jacobs USA Qualcomm Hardware 1.55 79
974 Vinod Khosla USA KPCB, Khosla Venture capital 1.5 58
974 Bob Parsons USA Go Daddy Internet 1.5 62
974 Jerry Yang USA Yahoo Internet 1.5 44
1031 John Brown USA Stryker Corp. Medical devices 1.4 78
1031 Steve Case USA AOL Internet 1.4 54
1031 Henry Nicholas, III. USA Broadcom Hardware 1.4 53
1107 Mark Stevens USA Sequoia Venture capital 1.3 53
1107 Jon Stryker USA Stryker Corp. Medical devices 1.3 54
1107 Nicholas Woodman USA GoPro Hardware 1.3 37
1161 Graham Weston USA Rackspace Internet 1.25 49
1175 Jim Breyer USA Accel Venture capital 1.2 51
1175 Robert Duggan USA Computer Motion Medical devices 1.2 68
1268 James Clark USA Netscape Internet 1.1 68
1268 Jack Dorsey USA Twitter, Square Internet 1.1 36
1268 Eric Lefkofsky USA Groupon Internet 1.1 43
1342 John Morgridge USA Cisco Hardware 1 79

American Public Television PBS celebrates Silicon Valley

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February 5th 2013 was a special day for PBS and Silicon Valley: 3 documentaries were shown one after the other. It was:

1- Silicon Valley on PBS American Experience “TV’s most watched history series”

AmericanExperience-PBS2013

2- Something Ventured, one of my favorite documentary on the topic. I mentioned already here: Something Ventured: a Great Movie and I show ti to my students as often as I can!

3- Steve Jobs, One Last Thing

SteveJobs-onelastthing

If you don’t want to buy it, here is is!

You can also read the interesting 3 PBS films on Silicon Valley by the San Francisco Chronicle.

I read a lot about SV. Now we probably live times when it’s time to watch videos.

New rankings of the best technology clusters: the USA still leads.

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There are so many articles, studies about technology clusters or ecosystems that I am not sure exactly why I write this. The only explanation is that I have read a couple of simultaneous studies, all mostly going in the same direction. Whereas there’s been a trend claiming the decline of the USA in favor of Asia or predicting the decline of Silicon Valle (SV), these ones show the opposite: the USA still leads, and among the American clusters, Silicon Valley is by far #1.

The first study is the Startup Ecosystem Report 2012 by the StartupGenome. You can read for example what techCrunhc says about it: Startup Genome Ranks The World’s Top Startup Ecosystems: Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv & L.A. Lead The Way.
The following table was kind of a surprise to me, not because SV is leading (this has been obvious for me for many years), but because Boston is #6 only.

I read the report and changed the ranking method with their own data and got the following new graph. I basically weighted all parameters (Output, Funding, Performance, Mindset, Support, Talent, Trendsetter, Differentiation to SV) on the horizontal axis, but deleted the last two ones on the vertical axis as I was not convinced about their role. It obviously shows there is a lot of subjectivity in rankings! The only thing which does not seem to be debatable is that SV is number 1.

There’s been another interest study: Ecosystem 101: The Six Necessary Categories To Build The Next Silicon Valley. It’s a good complement to the Startup Genome work, which is weak on Asia. The criteria here are Market, Capital, People, Culture, Infrastructure and Regulations. Again the USA leads, but weakness here is that we do not have a more detailed description of local clusters.

Finally, there’s been a strange analysis comparing US universities, whowing that Stanford leads and MIT is not even number 2. This is about VC money. The University Entrepreneurship Report – Alumni of Top Universities Rake in $12.6 Billion Across 559 Deals

Well, Silicon Valley might be declining, btu my feeling is it will be a long time before it loses its #1 position…

The Apple Revolution

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I have not read (yet) Isaacson’ authorized biography of Steve Jobs but found (by pure accident) another recent, funny an really great book, The Apple Revolution. Interesting too and somewhat related to a previous blog I published on Robert Noyce and the culture of Silicon Valley. As important is the subtitle: Steve Jobs, the Counterculture and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World.

Dormehl, the author, is convincing when he explains that Silicon Valley is the result of the counter-culture as much as the Midwest engineers coming to SV. Noyce might have agreed! “This ideological divide is not uncommon. Silicon Valley has long been defined by the innate tension between the technologist’s urge to share information and the industrialist’s incentive to profit. […] There were aspects of the counterculture that were staunchly anti-capitalists in their views. […] One of them was definitely Marxist and the other was largely apolitical.[..] “Do you own thing” easily translated into “Start your own business”. [Pages 61-63] “Only in Silicon Valley could starting a business be read as an act of rebellion.” [Page 169]

There are so many (unknown-to-me) anecdotes that I will only mention a few. For example, I did not know about Ron English, the guerrilla street artist who circumvented Apple’s billboards using murderer Charles Manson.

“The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers.” Jobs told wired in 1996. “They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans – if they worked hard with other creative, smart people,- could solve most of the humankind’s problems. I believe that very much.” [Pages 7-8]

At the same time, the counter-culture, the hacker culture has been critical [page 17]:
– Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total;
– All information should be free;
– Mistrust authority – promote decentralization;
– Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position;
– You can create art and beauty on a computer;
– Computers can change your life for the better.

A funny anecdote is a woman going to the Homebrew Computer Club because nearly all the attendees were male. Her verdict: “the odds were good, but the goods were odd”. (Page 25)

You will learn about the history of the Apple logo [pages 85-90] and the first killer apps (word processing and spreadsheets). I did not know Paul Lutus and John Draper. And what about Apple first ad campaigns!


(Go to youtube at http://www.youtube.com/embed/J0Rs7d16jhU if you do not see the embedded frame!)

You will obviously read about the mouse, about interactions with Xeroc PARC and also learn about the early days of the MacIntosh concept and its father, Jef Raskin who yanked sharply in the arm of a young developer when he saw his face and guessed his thinking, labeling as “wet-behind-the-ears marketing puke, dressed in a ridiculous chalk-pinstripe, complete with banker’s vest, shoes off, stinky feet up […] an abrasive punk in need of a slap” a Steve Jobs he had not recognized! [Page 189]

“The Macintosh project represented the first time – outside the Garage in which the Apple II had been built – that Apple would put together the kind of small, dedicated team that would produce some of the company’s greatest products in later years. Jobs referred to this company-within-a-company approach as returning to the “metaphorical garage”. The Macintosh team still had all the piss and vinegar of a start-up. “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have” Jobs said. “When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least one hundred times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” [Page 202]

You will also read about the legal issued Apple faced in the music field and the funny origin of the Sosumi. It’s not only about Apple, you will read about Next early team, Dan’l Lewin, Rich Page, George Crow, Bud Tribble Susan Barnes an Susan Care as well as Pixar’s founding team, Alvy Ray Smith, Edwin Earl Catmull and John Lasseter ; “Pundits even came up with a tongue-in-cheek name for the unlikely convergence of Silicon Valley technology and Hollywood moviemaking. They called it Sillywood.“ [Page 303] So you can comment my tentative cap. table of NeXT (see below) when acquired by Apple.

Another piece of video is Pixar first work, The adventures of Andre and Wally B. If Jobs did OK with Next, what about with Pixar. He got 70% for $10M then Smith and Catmull each had 4%. But jobs got 100% after putting $50M. [Pages 335-336] There is also the funny anecdote that the iMac could have been called the MacMan, sounding “like a cross between the video game Pac-Man and Sony’s handheld music player, the Walkman.” [Page 413]. There is also an analysis of intellectual property [Pages 430-431] “Whether or not a breakdown i traditional copyright laws odes, in fact, lead to a similar decline in creativity and innovation remains a hotly contested debate” adding that “Gates, typically referred as imaginative”, and having “never invented anything” is wrong. “Gates had invented the notion that Software (be it entire operating systems or simple files) could be sold. Jobs merely reframed the idea as a necessary protective measure for creativity.” Apparently Dormehl advises to read Lawrence Lessig’s  The Future of Ideas.

In the final chapters, Dormehl addresses the Apple paradox of the counterculture becoming mainstream. He quotes Norman Mailer [Page  384] “One is Hip or one is Square” and he adds [Page 408] that “no one better summarized the new ruling creative class of boomer bobos (that’s bourgeois bohemians) than Steve Jobs. […] They are prosperous without seeming greedy; they pleased their elders without seeming conformist; they have risen towards the top without too obviously looking down on those below; thy have achieved success without committing certain socially sanctioned affronts to the ideal of social equality; they have constructed a prosperous lifestyle while avoiding the old clichés of conspicuous consumption.”  Then [Page  456] Paul Lutus describes the App Store as a “classic marketer’s dream, with too many programmers with too many programs chasing too few buyer dollars, and the marketer in the middle the only really cashing in.” (Perfect capitalism, long if ever lost counterculture…) “Apple turning its back on its founding libertarian ideals.” […] “With the suggestion made that high-tech libertarianism apparently leans heavily towards the puritanical.” Still Jobs did not forget some elements of the start-up culture. “Jobs wanted the department to have only one hundred people, since that was the number of names he could remember.” “Apple was able to avoid unnecessary levels of bureaucracy. We’re the biggest start-up ion the planet Jobs proudly noted in 2010.” [Pages  462-463.] About innovation, “Gladwell’s suggestion (via economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr) is that it is history’s tweakers – more so even than its inventors – who truly define the age:  The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. that is not a lesser task. [Page  474] And as a near final quote from Norman Mailer again “One is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West  of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”  “It is for this reason that musicians like Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix who passed away at the age of twenty-seven, will forever be seen as young, idealistic rebels.” “The sheer scale of the current Apple makes it difficult to consider it any kind of rebel.”  [Page  502]  “Despite being declared moribund 59 times since 1995” [Page  495] , Apple is a formidable capitalist story as the next graph shows.

As a conclusion, let me quote Jobs again, and I discovered this on the Wikipedia page for Think Different:
“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is – everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”


(Go to youtube at http://www.youtube.com/embed/4oAB83Z1ydE if you do not see the embedded frame!)

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce

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I am reading a new book on Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley entitled The Apple Revolution. I will come back on what I think when I am finished reading it. I discovered in the first pages of this book that famous author Tom Wolfe had written in 1983 another article about Silicon Valley centered around Bob Noyce, The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce.

You probably do not remember my previous posts mentioning Noyce, and if not you may want to read them:
– What is the mentor role? in August 2010.
– The Man Behind the Microchip in February 2008.
It is not very surprising that Noyce, the founder of Intel, is mentioned in a book about Apple computer. Noyce was a mentor to Jobs as you may see below or by reading my post above. Don Valentine add further that Noyce and Jobs may have been the two most important personalities of Silicon Valley: “There were only two true visionaries in the history of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs and Bob Noyce. Their vision was to build great companies…”

Wolfe’s article is great and if you do not have time to read The Man behind the Microchip, you might want to read this shorter version. let me just extract a few things:

About the culture of Silicon Valley, work, openness and …
“The new breed of the Silicon Valley lived for work. They were disciplined to the point of back spasms. They worked long hours and kept working on weekends. They became absorbed in their companies the way men once had in the palmy days of the automobile industry. In the Silicon Valley a young engineer would go to work at eight in the morning, work right through lunch, leave the plant at six-thirty or seven, drive home, play with the baby for half an hour, have dinner with his wife, get in bed with her, give her a quick toss, then get up and leave her there in the dark and work at his desk for two or three hours on “a couple things I had to bring home with me.
Or else he would leave the plant and decide, well, maybe he would drop in at the Wagon Wheel for a drink before he went home. Every year there was some place, the Wagon Wheel, Chez Yvonne, Rickey’s, the Roundhouse, where members of this esoteric fraternity, the young men and women of the semiconductor industry, would head after work to have a drink and gossip and brag and trade war stories about phase jitters, phantom circuits, bubble memories, pulse trains, bounceless contacts, burst modes, leapfrog tests, p-n junctions, sleeping-sickness modes, slow-death episodes, RAMs, NAKs, MOSes, PCMs, PROMs, PROM blowers, PROM burners, PROM blasters, and teramagnitudes, meaning multiples of a million millions. So then he wouldn’t get home until nine, and the baby was asleep, and dinner was cold, and the wife was frosted off, and he would stand there and cup his hands as if making an imaginary snowball and try to explain to her… while his mind trailed off to other matters, LSIs, VLSIs, alpha flux, de-rezzing, forward biases, parasitic signals, and that terasexy little cookie from Signetics he had met at the Wagon Wheel, who understood such things.
It was not a great way of life for marriages.”

About youth and innovation:
“The rest of the hotshots were younger. It was a business dominated by people in their twenties and thirties. In the Silicon Valley there was a phenomenon known as burnout. After five or ten years of obsessive racing for the semiconductor high stakes, five or ten years of lab work, work lunches, workaholic drinks at the Wagon Wheel, and work-battering of the wife and children, an engineer would reach his middle thirties and wake up one day; and he was finished. The game was over. It was called burnout, suggesting mental and physical exhaustion brought about by overwork. But Noyce was convinced it was something else entirely. It was…age, or age and status. In the semiconductor business, research engineering was like pitching in baseball; it was 60 percent of the game. Semiconductor research was one of those highly mathematical sciences, such as microbiology, in which, for reasons one could only guess at, the great flashes, the critical moments of inspiration, came mainly to those who were young, often to men in their twenties. The thirty-five year-old burnouts weren’t suffering from exhaustion, as Noyce saw it. They were being overwhelmed, outperformed, by the younger talent coming up behind them. It wasn’t the central nervous system that was collapsing, it was the ego.”

About status, hierarchy and success:
“And if he was extremely bright, if he seemed to have the quality known as genius, he was infinitely more likely to go into engineering in Iowa, or Illinois or Wisconsin, then anywhere in the East. Back east engineering was an unfashionable field. The east looked to Europe in matters of intellectual fashion, and in Europe the ancient aristocratic bias against manual labor lived on. Engineering was looked upon as nothing more than manual labor raised to the level of a science. There was “pure” science and there was engineering, which was merely practical. Back east engineers ranked, socially, below lawyers; doctors; army colonels; Navy captains; English, history, biology, chemistry, and physics professors; and business executives. This piece of European snobbery that said a scientist was lowering himself by going into commerce. Dissenting Protestants looked upon themselves as secular saints, men and women of God who did God’s work not as penurious monks and nuns but as successful workers in the everyday world.”

Although he was an atheist, Wolfe sees in the values of “Dissenting Protestantism” roots of the Silicon Valley culture. “Just why was it that small-town boys from the Middle West dominated the engineering frontiers? Noyce concluded it was because in a small town you became a technician, a tinker, an engineer, and an and inventor, by necessity. “In a small town,” Noyce liked to say, “when something breaks down, you don’t wait around for a new part, because it’s not coming. You make it yourself.”

Interestingly enough the Apple Revolution also mentions all these points, but in the context of the hippie counter-culture… wait for next post!

European Founders at Work

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European Founders at Work is a very interesting book. It is the perfect complement to Founders at Work, particularly for the European dimension.

One comment though, I noticed 8 UK projects out of a little more than 20 and these 20 are mostly Software or Internet. More diversity may have been great. This being said, the lessons are great! Here are some… (and you will learn much more by reading the book entirely!)

About the US Market (for Europeans)

“I think that Europe has a lot of credibility in certain sectors, particularly media and the creative industry, but I think that in technology, generally, most of the world’s biggest companies were founded in the US and, therefore, the expectation in the US market is that in technology, they are going to be talking and buying from US companies. […] it’s important to become a US team in the US market. […] I think you need to be prepared to make a pretty big investment in the US and you need to be prepared to build up the business for several years,” Jos White – MessageLabs

“I would say that the IT sector, and especially enterprise software, is extremely global but remains dominated by US companies. There are very, very few examples of European IT and software companies that have managed to go global. I believe, the only way to make that happen is to go global very, very quickly, as we did from the outset.” Bernard Liautaud – Business Objects

“In my experience, if you come from a smaller European market, like Hungary or Sweden, you tend to think that it’s a nice next step to go to UK or Germany. The issue is that if you become successful there, it is still only a sixth of that of the US market. So, if you get a US competitor, you immediately become a regional player instead of a global player. So, very early on, I said we shouldn’t even be thinking about opening up offices in Frankfurt or in London because the way to make it globally was to first prove that we can make it on the world’s biggest market, which is the US. That’s going to be the truth at least for the next ten to fifteen years.” Peter Arvai – Prezi

“I think the reality is that it’s not about Europe vs. Silicon Valley. The best entrepreneurs in Europe understand Silicon Valley very well. They have spent time in Silicon Valley and developed relationships in Silicon Valley. Take all of that and all of the value that comes from that because you’re a fool if you think that Silicon Valley isn’t the most sophisticated, vibrant place for technology start-ups on the planet. It probably will continue to be so for the next twenty-five to fifty years because of the network. And the ecosystem is so profound there and keeps on getting stronger with Zynga, with Twitter, with Facebook, etc. I think any European entrepreneur or any entrepreneur in this space that doesn’t want to spend time or learn from Silicon Valley is foolish. But I think there’s a lot of things that you can learn and be aware of as an entrepreneur if you’re not in Silicon Valley, that you can use to your advantage.” Saul Klein – LoveFilm


The interviewed entrepreneurs

About success and failure

“Any successful entrepreneur knows that it was a combination of skill and attitude, with luck, that really leads to success. And there are very fine lines between success and failure” Jos White – MessageLabs

“I learned that the game is never over: you should never give up, stubbornness is somehow a requirement to lead a company to success, and the road to success is inevitably paved with failures. When things start to go wrong, the worst thing to do is panic and change everything.” Olivier Poitrey – DailyMotion

“I think as an entrepreneur you fail all the time. You’ve got failure built into your business. Right? So you don’t really keep track of failure. You never really fail. I think that’s essential when you’re an entrepreneur, that you’re not afraid of failure. You embrace failure. Your whole business is based on trying out stuff, being ready for stuff to fail and just taking the next step as soon as you fail.” Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten – The Next Web

About ambition

“Come up with an idea which is impossible then try to find somebody who can make it un-impossible and then do deals which have never been done before.” from the Shazam founders

“[A new trend is] You definitely see entrepreneurs being extremely ambitious.” Reshma Sohoni – Seedcamp

“I guess one advice is it’s more exciting if you feel like you’re changing the world in a positive and innovative way. So we’d love to see more of those out of Europe.” Brent Hoberman – lastminute.com

“But it is probably harder in Europe in that it innovates less, because you have less-crazy investors financing crazy entrepreneurs. [Advice:] One, international. Two, innovation and no copycat. And then, three, big ambition.” Loic Le Meur – Le Web

About the team

“There are very few founders that stay with their businesses beyond five years and quite often, in my opinion, it’s because they didn’t manage to surround themselves with the right team.” Bernard Liautaud – Business Objects

“But also obviously you hire people that are better than you” Ian Dodsworth – TweetDeck

“I also learned how hiring the right people from the start is key: the very first people to join will shape the company’s personality. And finding talented people you are pleased to work with is very important to generate emulation from new hires. Olivier Poitrey – DailyMotion

“A common mistake is building the team. If they’re quite scared to part with something … Like when they’re quite scared to part with equity or bringing on mentors. “Do you want to be a big fish in a small pond or a big fish in a big pond?” They’re too closed with their equity and they try to do everything.” Reshma Sohoni – Seedcamp

“Another common mistake is like a cliché now, but it’s just the classic: “I’ll just build another feature and I’ll focus on my product.” Alex Farcet – Startupbootcamp

About entrepreneurship

“The main advice is just start. Many people have hundreds of ideas, but they never really start their own project. And if you fail, start again. Entrepreneurship is, in my point of view, the best and the only way to personal development” Lars Hinrichs – Xing

“There are a lot of moments like that where you don’t know what you’re doing, but this was the whole point.” Giacomo Peldi Guilizzoni – Balsamiq

“ “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.” Eric Wahlforss – Soundcloud

“I have been lucky enough to be born with optimism.” Richard Moss – moo.com

“Hang in there. Don’t give up. I heard that most start-ups fail because the founders stop working on them.” Richard Jones – last.fm

“I would be realistic and I would say, “Look, if you think you are the lucky sperm that’s going to get the ovule, go ahead and start the business.” It’s a very difficult thing to do with a very high probability of failure. But it is essential for society and even those who try and fail are also helping society. So I encourage people to try, but at the same time warning them how difficult it is. I am tenacious and I am sometimes lucky and I’m good at spotting trends. But I was also lucky. Most people who try businesses fail. That’s the truth and people should be warned about that.” Martin Varsavsky – FON

As a conclusion let me quote Saul Klein in his foreword… “Right now, Silicon Valley is peerless at both supporting innovation and creating serious scale. There’s been no master plan, but the 60-year interplay of government as an early catalyst; academia and established companies as early customers and sources of talent; and of course, investors willing to take risks and a long term view, have given entrepreneurs fertile ground to sow seeds and try to grow monsters with dragon’s teeth ready to conquer the world.You need every element of this ecosystem working perfectly to create monsters. This is serious progress. But the straight facts are that while we are unquestionably masters of invention in Europe, we don’t yet have the ecosystem— or perhaps the attitude. […] For me, the big question is if we are truly able to do this.”

Post Scriptum: I am not finished yet. I love to add cap. tables and not so many of these entrepreneurs are running a publicly quoted company. Strangely enough, one is Russian, Yandex. Its foudner and CTO says something great about sales: “I think one of them is when you create a software product, you have to learn how to sell it, you have to learn how to make it a product. It’s a very basic skill. I think every engineer has to try that at least once, to sell the software he created, regardless of how bad it is. No matter how unpolished your product is, you have to try to explain why it is good for someone else.”

Here is Yandex amazing cap. table…

Click on picture to enlarge

Something Ventured: a great movie

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I just watched Something Ventured and I loved it. Loved it so much I plan to have it shown to as many EPFL students as possible in the spring! It is a movie about passion, enthusiasm, energy, changing the world and yes… about money. When asked about their hope about the movie, producers Molly Davis Paul Holland said: Our high hope for this film is that every student that wants to be an entrepreneur—at every level, high school, business school, on corporate campuses—sees it. We want to see more young people fall in love with entrepreneurship… And if we have a quieter, more serious goal, it’s that I want policymakers to look at this and say ‘What can we do to make it easier, not harder, for people in this country to start those kinds of businesses?’

I would have said I hope that every student — at every level — sees it. And the producers added we were trying to explain our vision for the movie and said, ‘What we are envisioning is a movie like Reds [Warren Beatty’s 1981 film about the original Bolsheviks], where you go back in time to talk about an exciting period — in that case 1917 Russia — and ask people in the present day what it was like back then. Dan said ‘Ok, so you want to make Reds but without the Communists.’ That is ultimately what came about: A really beautiful dialogue with really interesting men and the people they financed.

“A Film About Capitalism, and (Surprise) It’s a Love Story.”

This is the title of another article about the movie, where the journalist says “moviegoers can see what might be the rarest bird in the documentary world: a genuine love story about capitalism.” Somewhere else, the moviemaker, Dayna Goldfine explains: “I think what compelled us to take this one on, even though it is a positive view of business, was, one, it’s a chance to do this kind of alternative view. But also, what these guys were doing – both the entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists – was creating real products. So much of what has come down in terms of the financial tragedy of the last few years has been caused by the investment bankers –people who were really just creating financial instruments, as opposed to changing the world with technology by creating or funding an Apple Computer, or a Cisco Systems, or a Genentech”. Co-moviemaker Dan Geller adds: “I wouldn’t say that money was incidental – money was important – but the overwhelming enthusiasm was for taking these brilliant ideas and these inchoate technologies and making something earth-shattering with them. That’s the energy, I think, that comes through in these stories.”

Yes it is a movie about capitalism, about business. But it is also a movie about enthusiasm, happiness, failure also. It begins in 1957 with Fairchild and Arthur Rock. It could have begun with French expatriate Georges Doriot. A professor at Harvard who supposedly taught manufacturing (in fact it was about how many glasses to drink at a cocktail party and how to read newspapers – go to obituaries), Doriot did not create venture capital with ARD (even if he funded Digital Equipment – DEC) – Rock created the term later, but Doriot inspired most of the heroes of the movie: Tom Perkins, Bill Draper, Pitch Johnson, Dick Kramlich. And these guys funded Intel, Atari, Apple, Tandem, Genentech, Cisco. (The movie tells stories from the 60s to the 80s, but Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook could have been added). Indeed with the movie, the Social Network, it’s the best movie I have seen about high-tech entrepreneurship. What I had nearly forgotten in The Social Network is the closed Boston society (Zuckerberg desperate efforts to enter high-end social clubs). Here also, the Wild West explains its success through openness and risk taking.

And the authors did not cheat. It is also about painful memories, how Powerpoint ended up in Microsoft hands, maybe because the entrepreneur had found it too tough before or how one of the rare women in this world, Sandy Lerner, the co-founder of Cisco, may have not forgiven her firing from the company she had created: “you gotta understand the game that you’re in. […] Look, there wasn’t a box for me.” So yes, it is also about failures, “living deads”, but there is a “feel good” attitude, funny moments, such as when Valentine visiting the Atari factory does not recognize the cigarette brands he smokes!! Or when Gordon Moore (the famous Moore law) remembers that Intel went public the same day as PlayBoy.

So if you do not know much (or even if you do know a lot) about Fairchild, Intel, Atari, Tandem, Genentech, Apple, Cisco, and even if you do not care about entrepreneurship, run and watch Something Ventured. Hopefully you will care!

Triumph of the Nerds

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When I published Start-Up, a friend and colleague told me: “Why do you want to write something about high-tech entrepreneurship and start-ups. Nobody reads anymore. Make movies, videos!” He may have been right. Now that I heard about a new documentary about Silicon Valley and I will talk about this later in this post, it gave me the opportunity to look backwards. Triumph of the Nerds is a 3-episode (50 mns each) produced in 1996.

It is great, sometimes boring, often funny. Its author Robert X. Cringely is also the author of the related and very good book, Accidental Empires. You can watch the videos on YouTube and read the transcripts on PBS. I found Part I, the best. Part II about Microsoft and IBM is more serious, Part III about Apple is in-between.

First I found the best definition of a Nerd: “I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.”

Then about the semiconductor industry: “Intel not only invented the chip, they are responsible for the laid-back Silicon Valley working style. Everyone was on a first-name basis. There were no reserved parking places, no offices, only cubicles. It’s still true today. Here’s the chairman’s cubicle… Gordon Moore is one of the Intel founders worth $3 billion. With money like that, I’d have a door.” […] “Only Intel didn’t appreciate the brilliance of their own product, seeing it as useful mainly for powering calculators or traffic lights. Intel had all the elements necessary to invent the PC business, but they just didn’t get it.”

“What was needed was a version of some big computer language like BASIC, only modified for the PC. But it didn’t yet exist because the experts all thought that nothing would fit inside the tiny memory. Yet again the experts were wrong.” And here came … Microsoft … and Apple

Steve Jobs: “Remember that the Sixties happened in the early Seventies, right, so you have to remember that and that’s sort of when I came of age. So I saw a lot of this and to me the spark of that was that there was something beyond sort of what you see every day. It’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. And I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I think that that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit.”

Part III talks about how Xerox missed the high-tech revolution and Apple or Adobe used Xerox inventions. The output? “A software nerd is the richest man in the world.” We are in 1996. Gates: “You know, if you take the way the Internet is changing month by month, if somebody can predict what’s going to happen three months from now, nine months from now even today eh my hat’s off to them, I think we’ve got a phenomena here that is moving so rapidly that nobody knows exactly where it will go.”

Yes, it was an Accidental Empire.

There is another documentary Pirates of Silicon Valley but it looks very similar to Triumph of the Nerds, without the humour or Cringely. But the reason of this post, is the recent released of Something Ventured. This I will watch soon and hopefully show at EPFL to students and colleagues.

Here is the trailer:

The New Silicon Valley(s)

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Nice series on French-speaking Swiss Radio broadcast les Temps Modernes, this week about five stimulating experiments of high-tech clusters. Probably to fight the depressing mood around WEF and the economic crisis. (And not only because I was given the opportunity this morning to comment the last case! I was only invited on Wednesday… 🙂 )

Monday it was about Russia’s Skolkovo, which I had mentioned in a post a few months ago.

I did not know at all Kenya’s Konza, and this was really refreshing.

You cannot avoid China, but here also surprise, surprise, it was not Shanghai neither Shenzhen, but Zhongguancun.


I had heard of Startup Chile, because Stanford supports the experiment in South America.

Finally, I could comment the stimulating British case, the Silicon Roundabout, in East London. You can listen to or download the mp3 file (in French).

A spontaneous emerging cluster, a name given by a local entrepreneur, no real support by decision makers, at least in the beginning and a nice and enthusiastic atmosphere. And all this attracts people from abroad. Is this finally the cluster Europe has been waiting for? We shall see… The experiment is really interesting and if you want to know more, you may wish to read (French) Le Monde, Le “Silicon Roundabout”, un succès britannique, or The Economist, Silicon Roundabout.