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It's a shame that this happened, but you can see how it did. Those chips were built on the fervor of people imagining what we could someday do with them. They
by leggomylibro 9y ago
It's a shame that this happened, but you can see how it did.
Those chips were built on the fervor of people imagining what we could someday do with them. They could create a connected world, solve and create so many problems on a global scale...it's not super surprising that their successors went on to do those things.
What is surprising, and shameful, is how investors reacted, buying into the mania hook line and sinker. There cannot be a Bell Labs or Fairchild Semi in silicon valley today, because they could not promise 10,000,000% user growth and a massive acquisition in N years.
It seems like the market equivalent of snorting pixie sticks instead of eating a balanced meal, but I'm not the person with billions of dollars to swing around.
- mi100hael 9y ago> There cannot be a Bell Labs or Fairchild Semi in silicon valley today, because they could not promise 10,000,000% user growth and a massive acquisition in N years. Sure there can, they just can't have VC as a part of their business plan. Thankfully, more and more startups are realizing that VC is not their only option, nor usually their best one.
- leggomylibro 9y agoGood point - they will still need someone to front a lot of money, though. Talent and film-deposition facilities ain't cheap. I guess they could go with a Bajillionaire Patron, or get funding through usury. Sorry, those aren't even close to fair comparisons, but 'bootstrapping' does seem pretty out of reach these days, for people who don't already have 8-10 figures laying around.
- mi100hael 9y agoYeah, I agree. It's not like Bell Labs was ever "scrappy," though.
- leggomylibro 9y agoHa, yeah I guess they did sort of get the 'wealthy benefactor' thing with Ma Bell.
- derefr 9y agoI've always understood the real "bootstrapping" story to be "we build a successful business around a product we don't really care about in order to fun an R&D department that can build the products we do care about." Like Google, with ads.
- _dps 9y ago> There cannot be a Bell Labs ... [today] Google's R+D arms are arguably in the same broad category as Bell Labs was when it started out. We just need to wait 50 years to see if we will view them the same way in hindsight.
- leggomylibro 9y agoIt's more likely to be Samsung or Murata or something.
- CalChris 9y agoHow is Fairchild Semiconductor so different from PayPal? Both have insanely influential and successful alumni. I could have picked General Magic (Pierre Omidyar, Andy Rubin, ...) but they are less well known. How is Bell Labs so different from Google X? How is Bell Labs any different from IBM San Jose Research (SQL, photoresists, Gray+Agrawal, relational databases, reliable databases, ...)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]