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Why Has Apple Spawned So Few Startups?
- josep2 11y agoCurious
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- marvel_boy 11y agoSumming up: Apple's good pay, benefits and soaring stock.
- dataker 11y agoIf anything, an employee could just move to a company with better perks. Instead, their ambition and motivation appears to be large enough to accept smaller salaries and benefits to start their own company.
- vilmosi 11y agoThat's not really an answer. Many companies offer just that and more.
- larrys 11y agoBut with Apple there is the "aunt and your friends and family factor". Everybody has heard of Apple and a large swath of people would tend to be impressed by the fact that you worked there. It would also tend to be the type of place that obviously looks good on your resume if you need to get another job in the future so it offers that as additional security. Techies might care that you worked at Tesla, much of the rest of the world does not.
- jsmthrowaway 11y agoYou'd think so, but in my experience everyone, family or otherwise, warned to know secret information and were embarrassed and awkward when interacting with Android devices near me. The factor you allege was largely a wash for me.
- vilmosi 11y agoThere are many companies that offer just that "status" as well. I don't know why you think Apple is special in any way when it comes to jobs. In fact, I heard they're worse, exactly because of the "status" that comes with it.
- larrys 11y agoFurther summing up: It's a great career "statisfice".
- ianamartin 11y agoFew compared to what? Microsoft? Google? Facebook? Oh, the article doesn't quantify what it means by "few." It just throws that idea out there for no reason and then pretends it's a thing.
- Illniyar 11y ago"Although firm figures are hard to come by, Ganesan estimates Apple's tally of startups is about 50 percent smaller than companies such as Google, Yahoo and PayPal. (Coincidentally, smart thermostat maker Nest, the most prominent startup hatched by Apple alums, was acquired by Google last year.) " They did. Wheather that data is accurate is another matter.
- Retric 11y agoI would argue Pixar is a far more well known example outside of SV.
- jgmmo 11y agoWhat are you talking about? Pixar didn't come from Apple. It came from folks who left Disney. Then Steve Jobs, as himself - not Apple - invested in Pixar.
- Retric 11y agoPixar did not start up from a few random people leaving a company with a new idea. Jobs paid the company 5 million for the IP and then invested another 5 million to get things started. Granted, he sat on the board instead of being the CEO, but he was far from a hands off invester. Regularly investing more money and eventually becoming the CEO.
- jgmmo 11y agoBut you do understand Steve Jobs != Apple. In the argument about whether or not Apple has produced startups you said Pixar was an example, but that is not true. It's an example of Steve Jobs being entrepreneurial.
- pvg 11y agoArticle doesn't seem to give any evidence of this. Apple's been around forever and former Apple (and NeXT, if you stick to the logic it's some sort of Jobsian startup-suppression field) employees have been involved in zillions of startups over the years. EA, Danger/Android, Nest, Flipboard come to mind.
- trimbo 11y agoExactly. Though technically, NeXT is "a startup that Apple spawned", I think? Also: Be Inc., Palm/Handspring (Donna Dubinsky), General Magic, Eazel.
- cromulent 11y agoClaris? (FileMaker) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris
- steveax 11y agoAlso JLG's Be Inc (BeOS)
- meej 11y agoWhile reading the article I thought to myself, "I guess OQO is ancient history by now." I know at least two founders were Apple alums.
- VLM 11y agoA non-techies idea of innovative might not match startup ideas of innovation. Or rephrased apple-scale innovation might not scale down to startup-scale innovation. Total amount of innovation (for the sake of argument, big) divided by number of employees (staggering) equals not innovative on average and even the outliers will also suffer. Its a mindcrime to say it in public, but if some successful companies are innovative, and apple is successful, that doesn't logically follow that Apple is innovative. Rolex has a good reputation, makes nice watches that are very expensive; however they don't sell many cesium atomic clocks which are technologically far more innovative than a mechanical or quartz movement. A timekeeping startup could sell a GPSDO that sells for less than 50 cents, that would be impressive and innovative but not very Rolex-like. Perhaps Apple is the same.
- philwelch 11y agoInnovation in the context of big companies is a far different and more subtle thing than innovation in a startup context. A lot of the innovation large companies do is never really seen--not even in the sense that it isn't customer impacting, but rather in the sense that you never see the innovation that goes into simple functions that you take for granted. For instance, Apple is immensely innovative in terms of designing manufacturing processes. Do you see the results? You might notice that Apple products have more fit and finish, but the results are measured in millimeters at most. The end result is not as earthshaking as a whole new product category would be. Even more striking is any large web property. Any idiot could write a working version of Twitter, Amazon, StackExchange, or maybe even YouTube in a week. Scaling these to actually work at scale takes immense levels of innovation. But if you use these sites every week since they have been launched, you might not see any of that.
- alayne 11y agoLike others, I'm not sure that Apple has spawned few startups. The evidence here is weak. Apple's innovations have been primarily about hardware design. I would think there are many fewer hardware startups than software startups due to the amount of capital required to build hardware. It might be more apropos to compare the number of startups from other hardware companies (Intel, Nvidia, TI, HP, Sun).
- oblio 11y agoStill, don't they employ something like 100k software engineers?
- vilmosi 11y agoNot really, most of their workforce are "geniuses" and the like
- Alphasite_ 11y agoLast I checked they had 50k total staff and a big chunk of that would be in sales.
- pbreit 11y agoBecause no one ever leaves!
- fitshipit 11y agoUpThere?
- reagency 11y agoBecause Apple is not a webapp company, and webapps are the easiest and most common kind of startup.
- hayksaakian 11y agoMobile app startups are a big #2 at the very least, and what with apple being a manufacturer of a very popular phone I'd expect more from there.
- akhilcacharya 11y agoApple doesn't have very many people working in software compared to hardware, sales, design, etc.
- Eric_WVGG 11y ago(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this) My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.” It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup. I could be totally wrong about this.
- hoare 11y agoboth attitudes have their ups and downs i guess:)
- Apocryphon 11y agoIn some ways it can be thought of, "This company is the apotheosis of tech. You can get the full experience of a startup, with the stability of a giant corporation. Why would you want to go anywhere else?"
- QuercusMax 11y agoWhich company any are you referring to, Apple or Google? I am starting at Google[x] in two weeks for exactly that reason. I just spent the first 11 years of my career helping build a solid software organization (I was employee #14-ish, and I'm the most senior engineer whose job is primarily code-related) in Cleveland. It's now a well-oiled machine, but it's lost some of the spark and excitement of the first years I was there. I decided to go with Google[x] because I'm looking for an organization where they are all about doing exciting and innovative things, with the stability and perks of a big corporation.
- bomanbot 11y agoI guess it could very well be that the mentality of Apple and Google employees could lean somewhat into those philosophies. On the other hand, your described Apple culture sounds to me a heck of a lot more sustainable in the long run (I mean, Apple has now been around nearly 40 years now), especially since the "become a bazillionaire" part from Google really only works for founders and early employees with enough stock and only for very few selected unicorn companies.
- bomanbot 11y agoMaybe another reason why Apple spawned comparatively few startups might be that some of the areas of expertise for Apple and their employees are harder to do in startup-sized companies; namely hardware engineering and mass manufacturing innovation. Apple does a lot of work in hardware and hardware manufacturing, both areas which are pretty capital-intensive and might not lead themselves as easily to the startup world. Say, you are an Apple engineer working on the Ax chips for the next iPhone and have an idea for something great in CPU design, you cannot exactly rent a scalable 14nm chip fab from AWS to try to build it on your own and sell it market.
- Eric_WVGG 11y agoTrue, and it’s telling that maybe the biggest break-out startup from Apple was Nest. And for that very reason, I’m surprised that there aren’t more creatively stifled Apple hardware engineers pursuing IoT startups.
- derefr 11y ago> rent out a scalable 14nm chip fab from AWS I was pondering the viability of almost exactly this. Could one invest in a hardware pipeline that efficiently combines e.g. 3D printing with FPGAs to create the consumer-electronics equivalent of Lulu.com's just-in-time small-batch book printing + drop-shipping. Or, in other words: you can do pretty much anything with the sensors in a modern smartphone. All most manufacturers probably need is smartphone boards (with maybe some options of extra sensors) in custom cases with fancy buttons and displays, maybe custom remotes, and a cute little 4-colour double-walled box. That describes everything from Nest to Roku to some drone controllers.
- beambot 11y agoYou're probably better off using something like Samsung's Artik (https://www.artik.io/ https://www.artik.io/) that is basically cellphone-grade integration using existing high-density components.
- sliverstorm 11y agoThere's a risk/flaw/gap with that plan. Modern consumer electronics depend on humongous volume discounts- 10x or even 100x- on parts, plus tremendous economies of scale on design & assembly. JIT small-batch assembly seems roughly analogous to other low-volume electronics, which are obscenely expensive. For example, specialty bench equipment like spectrometers can cost as much as a house.. There are many factors at play there, but you can bet one of them is very low volumes. This is why, at least so far, the kind of play you describe is accomplished with large batches of a generalizable platform that can be sold into many different devices.
- tlogan 11y agoNot sure if this is true - I would like to see some stats. I think the problem is that the press will not write about some founder as "ex Apple engineer", "ex Oracle engineer", etc. It is not cool. The story will sell if founder are "ex-Google", "ex-Facebook", "ex-Dropbox", "Y-combinator", etc. For example, if you are ex-Oracle, then you need to have significant revenue in order to be mentioned in the press as ex-Oracle fonder (PeopleSoft, Salesforce, Sibel, etc.). If you are ex-Google, you need to raise 100K seed and press will say ex-Google.
- seizethecheese 11y agoI disagree entirely. Many of the Nest articles that I read were heavy on the "ex Apple" rhetoric.
- rimantas 11y agoMaybe because it was founded by former Senior VP and the "father" of iPod, not just some random Apple engineer?
- analog31 11y agoPerhaps people with an innovative or entrepreneurial bent don't gravitate to Apple in the first place, even if they love Apple products.
- shiggerino 11y agoFor some reason the only Apple-spawned startups that come to my mind are the ones that ultimately failed, like Be, Inc.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- opinionated1 11y agoMaybe it's because the company DNA attracts less entrepreneurial minded employees in the first place than for example Google. I think that people working for Apple: - like to have a strong leader in front of them (or at least used to when Jobs was around). - are engineers comfortable to be less at the center of product development than at other big tech companies. Whereas an entrepreneurial-minded person is famously rather reluctant to subordination. Exceptions confirm the rule.
- sgustard 11y agoHere's one minute of methodology to throw at this question. Search LinkedIn for title keyword "founder", past company Apple. I get 7668 hits. Same search for Google, 7277 hits. For Yahoo, 4268.
- robotresearcher 11y agoTo add a bit of context: Apple is 39 years old. Google is 17 years old.
- paulsutter 11y agoYounger companies spawn more startups because they have many employees who just experienced the hypergrowth phase of going from startup to known company. These employees have not only the right experience to start a company, they want to recreate the experience.