Read part 1 of this post for background. By the early 1920’s General Motors realized that Ford, which was now selling the Model T for $290, had an unbeatable monopoly on low-cost automobile manufacturing. Other manufacturers had experimented with selling cars based on an image and brand. (The most notable was an ad by the [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Technology | 32 Comments »
It was the most advanced consumer product of the century. The industry started with its innovators located in different cities over a wide region. But within 20 years it would be concentrated in a single entrepreneurial startup cluster. At first it was a craft business, then it was driven by relentless technology innovation and then [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Technology | 7 Comments »
I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. This is the first of two posts about Finland and entrepreneurship. —— I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. (Thanks to Kristo Ovaska and team [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Teaching, Technology, Venture Capital | 19 Comments »
Not understanding and agreeing what “Entrepreneur” and “Startup” mean can sink an entire country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. ——— I’m getting ready to go overseas to teach, and I’ve spent the last week reviewing several countries’ ambitious attempts to kick-start entrepreneurship. After poring through stacks of reports, white papers and position papers, I’ve come to a couple [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Business Model versus Business Plan, Teaching, Technology, Venture Capital | 59 Comments »
Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten involved in hiring for two startups, a public agency and a non profit. Part of each conversation was getting asked to help them put together a “job spec.” I had them leave with a pie chart. ——– There must be something in the air. In the last week [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture, Technology | 31 Comments »
Last week I had 15 Finnish entrepreneurs out to the ranch (Aalto University has a partnership with Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program.) Monday we hosted 40 Danish entrepreneurs for dinner and today its graduate students from Chalmers University in Sweden. Looks like the ice is melting in Scandinavia. Welcome to the democratization of entrepreneurship. Hermione Way of TheNextWeb grabbed [...]
Filed under: Technology, Venture Capital | 2 Comments »
Om Malik runs Gigaom, probably the most interesting and accurate site on the blogosphere. Om was kind enough to have me in for an interview. We covered a wide range of topics. This talk on Risk and Culture in Silicon Valley is a small 1 minute snippet of a longer interview on his blog.
Filed under: Family/Career/Culture, Teaching, Technology, Venture Capital | 10 Comments »
Carpe Diem We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What [...]
Filed under: Technology, Venture Capital | 50 Comments »
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.” Attributed to Ernest Shackleton In 1912 Ernest Shackleton placed this ad to recruit a crew for the ship Endurance and his expedition to the South Pole. This would be one of the [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Technology | 4 Comments »
If you’re a visiting dignitary whose country has a Gross National Product equal to or greater than the State of California, your visit to Silicon Valley consists of a lunch/dinner with some combination of the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter and several brand name venture capitalists. If you have time, the President of [...]
Filed under: Family/Career/Culture, Technology, Venture Capital | 30 Comments »
Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school Attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and B.F. Skinner There are 4633 accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. This weekend I had dinner last night with one of them – a friend who’s now the President of Philadelphia University. [...]
Filed under: Teaching, Technology | 18 Comments »
For its first few decades Silicon Valley was content flying under the radar of Washington politics. It wasn’t until Fairchild and Intel were almost bankrupted by Japanese semiconductor manufacturers in the early 1980’s that they formed Silicon Valley’s first lobbying group. Microsoft did not open a Washington office until 1995. Fast forward to today. The [...]
Filed under: Technology, Venture Capital | 53 Comments »
The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile. And the magnitude of [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology, Venture Capital | 83 Comments »
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation. Pearl S. Buck Ask people what makes entrepreneurs successful and you’ll hear a familiar list of adjectives; agile, tenacious, resilient, opportunistic, etc. What you don’t hear is that often they didn’t know any [...]
Filed under: Family/Career/Culture, Technology | 50 Comments »
If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Technology, Venture Capital | 27 Comments »
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