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Steve Blank is a respected Valley veteran who has written highly insightful and informative materials about the history and development of the Valley (see http:
by grellas 14y ago
Steve Blank is a respected Valley veteran who has written highly insightful and informative materials about the history and development of the Valley (see http://steveblank.com/secret-history/ http://steveblank.com/secret-history/) and so his opinion is worthy of note.
That said, I have been in the Valley since 1968, have watched its ups and downs professionally since the early 1980s, and can say without question that it is currently bursting at the seams with opportunity from every conceivable angle. Yes, the days when silicon was king are well past their "golden" stage but they have been replaced by an era where founders have decided leverage and power to realize great visions without having to overcome the resource/knowledge barriers that predominated just a decade ago, where innovative investors have more ability than ever to leverage early-stage situations in ways that used to be monopolized by just a few top-tier VCs, and where the disruptive impact of technological change generally is leaving old-guard companies staggering as startups who vigorously challenge them proliferate - all to the great benefit of society at large. Plans are afoot at every top-tier company - Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. - to grab control of the whole process and eventually dictate to others how they might participate in it, but such plans have not yet succeeded even when they once seemed almost inevitable (thinking of 90s Microsoft here). As long as companies remain free to innovate, there likely will be successive stages of greatness in the Valley (and, of course, elsewhere where comparable elements exist) and it is a mistake, in my view, to attempt to label any particular outstanding stage in the past, or any particular mode of growth, as "golden" in some special way. As long as human nature is what it is, enterprise will take many forms, each suitable to its time and no one form more particularly special than the other. The key is to capitalize on the opportunities as they exist, leaving history to play itself out as it will.
- jluan 14y agoI don't think the point you make contradicts Steve Blank's at all; to me, Blank's thesis is that startups in the Valley no longer choose to pursue truly disruptive technological innovation because our ecosystem now almost exclusively rewards areas such as social media, where you have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are, to the detriment of "hard tech" such as biotech, robotics, and the semiconductors of old.
- rmATinnovafy 14y agoThere is a growing number of individuals doing hard tech. They just focus on working, and not on getting Likes. The valley may be full of social media photo sharing people, but don't forget that the Valley still has strong roots on the homebrew side. For every social app out there, there are ten hackers pushing code on the local HackerSpace.
- temphn 14y agoElon Musk made his fortune with Paypal, an internet company. Google made its fortune on the internet. There is nothing that prevents people from making the easier dollars first in something like Zynga and then going and putting their personal $10M to work on something of substance.
- atarian 14y agoThis. A lot of people forget that Elon Musk spent a large portion of his own money to fund new ventures from Paypal. Bill Gates is helping many disadvantaged people around the world with the money he earned from Microsoft. I'd also like to point out that a lot of these Internet companies contribute to charities, so the money isn't just a 100% flow up the hierarchy.
- adpirz 14y agoThis doesn't hit the root of the problem. If we rely on the current SV enterprise model, we're basically just hoping that the billionaires that come out of this social media binge will be socially aware enough to invest in hard problems themselves, and in that sense, they become almost feudal lords. This is a case where I think, just like Blanks states, the government's responsibility to counteract market forces for the common good plays a role. We should be tripling our research grant budgets for hard science. I feel like every week I'm hearing of an MIT PhD student making major breakthroughs in nanotube battery capacity or thorium reactor tech, but these aren't valuable investments for private VCs because the returns will not be quick and will not be as outrageous as a site that can go live tomorrow with the virality of the Ebola virus. But that's just the way the cookie crumbles, ie, the market forces at work. I don't think it makes sense on a society level to be investing as much as we are in social ventures, and I hope we do find a way, public or private, to shift some of that investment back into solid tech. Wildcard prediction: biotech is the next big boom.