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How Scientists and Engineers Got It Right, and VCs Got It Wrong
- Ronkdar 15y agoLinking to this will probably kill this guy's server, but there's an interesting flow chart of semiconductor company inheritance in the article: http://steveblank.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/fairchild-silicon-valley-genealogy.jpg http://steveblank.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/fairchild-sili...
- wisty 15y agoIt looks like there's a lot of Japanese and German names on that chart. I'm guessing they weren't there on H1-Bs.
- Locke1689 15y agoAmerican immigration means that last names are not great ways of determining nationality. My last name is German but I'm 5th or higher generation American.
- Symmetry 15y agoHeck, people of German Descent are the majority in most places in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Census-2000-Data-Top-US-An...
- Locke1689 15y agoSteve Blank's got more than enough bandwidth and ever since optimized web servers (e.g., Nginx), you really have to try to kill a webserver with static content these days. I wouldn't worry about it.
- StavrosK 15y agoCoral cache: http://steveblank.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net/2010/08/fairchild-silicon-valley-genealogy.jpg http://steveblank.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net/2010/08/fairc... Although, it's hosted on wordpress.com, isn't it...
- btilly 15y agoAn interesting read, but I disagree with his take. First of all the idea that tech startups should be started by tech people goes back a lot farther than Silicon Valley. For example take a look at the history of the early automobile industry in Detroit. The founders of the early car companies were for the most part people like Henry Ford - engineers, mechanics, and other people who knew the technology rather than management types. Silicon Valley fits the mold of previous startup hubs. The more major mistake is that Genetech's IPO in 1980 is cited for getting researchers involved in commercialization. However most observers cite the Bayh-Dole act in the same year as being the critical factor. It gave organizations such as universities the right to intellectual property (such as patents) arising out of research funded by the US government. This created a tremendous number of opportunities for commercializing research that simply had not existed previously.
- hung 15y agoUnnecessary apostrophe is unnecessary.
- katieben 15y agoGrammar offender captured! (: http://pluralizeit.com http://pluralizeit.com
- hammock 15y agoDepending on which style book you are using, an apostrophe can be acceptable when pluralizing an acronym or number, e.g. the 1990's. My preference is to omit the apostrophe. Another possibility is that it's a contraction for "VC has," referring to the entire category of venture capital. This is less likely given that it destroys the parallel structure.
- Symmetry 15y agoUnnecessary... but not meaningless. It changes the cadence of the title in a way that doesn't alter the denotation, but does shift some connotations a bit. EDIT: Oops, somehow I misread apostrophe as comma.
- divtxt 15y agoNecessary and meaningful, and wrong in this case. - "VCs Got It Wrong" means: many (plural) VCs got something wrong - "VC's Got It Wrong" means: a "Got It Wrong" that belongs to a VC
- vannevar 15y agoThis is the best definition of the term 'start-up' I have yet seen: startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model This definition explains why funding is the single best predictor of startup success: it permits the startup to survive until it can hit upon a successful product. Because most products fail. Even a product that succeeds depends as much or more on market context beyond the perception of its creators as it does on its intrinsic value. People are important, but they can only stick around as long as there is funding. (Of course, funding depends heavily on social networks, so in that sense the people are important.) But as the author acknowledges in the article, the fact that VCs generally don't understand why one startup succeeds and another fails does not change the fact that they control the single greatest differentiator: money.
- randall 15y agoI'm going to suggest you read more of Steve Blank's writings if you've never heard this definition before. Maybe try " Four Steps to the Epiphany" or the like. (Or, if you can't handle that, try the Entreprenuer's Guide to Customer Development.)
- seats 15y agoWhat would you call a company that from its start uses a well-known scalable and repeatable business model?
- nknight 15y agoDoomed? Seriously, new companies that don't have something substantively different about them don't have good odds. In brick-and-motar that "something different" might just be geographic location (e.g. a car mechanic in a town that doesn't have one), but in the online world, you usually need something more. The "somethings different" can be only slight changes to the models (better customer service, better support for language X, etc.), but they're always different in some way. "Startup" can imply something radically different, but it doesn't have to, and in any case, even companies that _try_ to stick to an existing business model rarely do, and the plans always change and adjust as you go along, it doesn't matter what kind of business you're in.
- bchjam 15y agoreminds me of Research-Driven Startups by Brad Cross http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/7/2/research-driven-startups.html http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/7/2/research-driven-s...