I was out of the country for much of 2009, so it wasn’t until I spent two months back in San Francisco that I noticed a big change in the Web community. Babies. I’m not talking about whiny Millennials coming out of college and demanding venture capital for their iPhone app. I’m talking about actual babies. The ones that crawl around the house wearing diapers.
In 2006, I co-wrote a BusinessWeek cover story on the then-burgeoning Web 2.0 movement, and one the hallmarks of the scene was a sense of having been burned by the dot com boom and bust. That was when many of the leaders, investors, and foot soldiers of the Web 2.0 movement had moved to Silicon Valley and had their first taste of startup life. As a result many of them, like Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide or Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter, had lived a rollercoaster of wild life experiences when it came to business—takeovers, ousters, commanding millions in venture capital, but not much in the way of traditional “life experiences.” You know marriage, kids, and the like. Despite having net worths in the millions of dollars, many of them didn’t even own a house. Many didn’t think they had time.
My, how that has changed. The 30-something Valley generation that moved to the Valley fresh after college, stuck out the crash and got in early on the Web 2.0 movement are now married and having babies. Lots of them.
Examples include not only Levchin and Williams, but Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path and now Small Batch, Narendra Rocherolle of WebShots and The Start Project, James Hong of HotorNot, Jason Calacanis of “the Jason Nation,” Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr and now Hunch, Ben and Mena Trott of Six Apart and more. At a recent dinner party at our house, my husband and I looked around the table and realized for the first time in a decade in the Valley we were the only ones without a babysitter. Recently married Phillip Kaplan of FuckedCompany.com/AdBrite/Blippy told me he had big news at lunch the other day and my immediate question was, “Are you having a baby?”
I’ve asked a few people what caused this about face, at a relatively late stage of life compared to elsewhere in the US. Many said it’d taken them a while to find “the one” and once they did, a baby felt right. Many others had gone through the insanity of the dot com bubble, the brutal crash, and then jumped back on the treadmill for Web 2.0. Now in another recession, it just seemed like there should be something more.
This kind of thinking would be anathema a few years ago, but several entrepreneurs have said in private conversations, “This current company could go under, but I still have my family.”
To anywhere else in the US, this may sound “So what? People have babies all the time.” But in the Valley, this is a staggering injection of work-life balance into the 24/7 Web space. Perhaps it’s just the reality of this generation getting older. After all, the still early-20s Mark Zuckerberg isn’t having kids, neither is the still-acting-in-his-early-20s Kevin Rose. But given the supernova of the late 1990s, it’s a big population of Web influencers and taste-makers that are all of the sudden cooing and speaking in baby-talk.
What does this mean? For people like me, who live here, lots of little things, like kids birthday parties and chats about diaper rash. But for the Web, it means something too. This generation has always designed out of need, they’ve built things they’d like to exist. My bet is that in the next five years we’re going to see a boom of baby and kid Web and gadget ideas, as the people with the most clout (and in some cases, money) in the Web world start to realize how the rest of 30-somethings in America live.
What better way to start your Saturday afternoon than with a pair of Nexus One release rumors. Without further ado, first up comes whispers care of Neowin that the recently-FCC'd CDMA device is launching on Verizon's network March 23rd, perfect timing for the beginning of CTIA. And while that fits pretty neatly into that initial "Spring 2010" launch window, there's really no way for us to corroborate at this point other than just taking their word for it. Moving across the pond, sources from both Google and Vodafone reportedly send word to UK's Telegraph that Voda's getting its own model in April -- obviously a far cry from the "few short weeks" we heard back in April (as that deadline's definitely come and gone) but still not too far off. No word on price but last we heard it was rumored at around €150. You can wait diligently, can't ya?
Nexus One coming to Verizon March 23rd and Vodafone in April? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote, “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.”
Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are. My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn’t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn’t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.
We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business — just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simons (Def Jam founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)
Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.
There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).
What did affect their successes? Education — but not the college they graduate from. In a different study of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn’t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.
The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at “teachable moments” — when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn’t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge. That’s why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.
One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth “scale” businesses. These new firms, especially the “scale” firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups. After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.
That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs. This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with “scalable ideas” can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator on steroids.
Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don’t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path — which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.
The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, “Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition”. The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population – a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).
Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.
Western Digital has yet to actively market its "advanced format" hard drives -- in fact, there's a decent chance you've no idea what we're talking about if you weren't tuned in on December 11th. In short, it's a technology that alters a hard drive's sector size from 512 bytes (the standard for the past three decades) to 4096K, which enables the ECC data to be stored in a more efficient manner. Just recently, WD began to ship Advanced Format Caviar Green hard drives, and the benchmarking gurus over at Hot Hardware strapped one in to see exactly how much of the hype was warranted. For starters, they debunked the thought that Advanced Format drives offered more usable space; Windows reported 931GB of free space on both AF and non-AF 1TB drives. They also go on to explain how to make AF drives play nice with Windows XP, and on the testing front, they found that an aligned AF Caviar Green drive could (mostly) hang with the higher end (and more expensive) Caviar Black. Pop that source link for the full skinny, particularly if you're a WinXP user looking to snag a new drive.
WD's 'Advanced Format' Caviar Green HDD gets benchmarked, minor benefits found originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.