Facebook IPO Lessons
Like most people, I had the opportunity to review Facebook’s IPO filing yesterday and admit that, like Apple’s recent earnings announcement, this is pretty damn impressive. Here are a couple of lessons worth reinforcing: 1) People’s view of what is normal and acceptable in emergent online activities is constantly evolving. What Facebook deserves a lot [...]
Economics On The Ground in Silicon Valley
The economy appears to be on the minds of magazine editors these days and no wonder. With the stimulus running out the economy appears to be headed south again. This contradicts my experience last week in Silicon Valley where the CEOs I met with said they were, 1) Raising more money, not because they need [...]
Common Worries Among Corporations and Governments
Corporations and governments are starting to worry about a common set of related issues. During the last two months I was fortunate to participate in several conversations with top corporate executives and foreign government officials all of whom are visiting Silicon Valley with increasing frequency. The conversations covered topics ranging from innovation and the rapid [...]
Come On Silicon Valley, We Can Provide a Better Rx for Jobs!
Fortune magazine has an article running that Techmemed about some advice Barrack Obama is getting about jobs from Silicon Valley Heavyweights like Kleiner VC John Doerr and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. They’re all about Education and Immigration Visa Reform as the path to creating jobs, along with plugs along the way for their own ventures. Here [...]
A Big Day for LinkedIn
About 10 years ago, I did a swing through Silicon Valley while doing some research on early Social Networking companies, including a number of mostly-or-entirely defunct companies like Spoke, Visible Path, ZeroDegrees, Plaxo and others. During that trip I stopped by the offices of a (then-) small company called LinkedIn. I recall the meeting [...]
Monday’s Musings: Reflections On Obama And The False Hope For A Tech Halo
President Obama’s Visit Reflects The Importance Of Silicon Valley To The US Economy By now everyone’s seen and re-seen the photo showing the tech-centric dinner at John Doerr’s house in Woodside, CA on February 17th, 2011 (see Figure 1). With a guest list that included most of the “Captains of the Tech Industry” it would [...]
What the Obama Tech Supper Gang Should Do About Jobs
What do you suppose 12 Tech CEO’s and VC’s discussed with President Obama at their dinner? Many things, I suppose, but almost certainly there would’ve been a discussion about the job situation. More than likely this was focused around Obama’s interests in improving education and US competitiveness. I was shocked to get a note from [...]
To the winners go the spoils
I have seen at least a dozen of my smartest friends refer to Bill Gurley’s terrific post this week before I actually got around to reading it – which I finally did. My first thought upon reading it was of some recent discussions on StockTwits as well as among my Enterprise Irregulars colleagues, particularly in [...]
New Kingmakers: Software Developer Talent as Financial Bubble
Interesting post from Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures today: he is worried investments are happening without due diligence… but the war for development talent is the real issue for startups and investors. We are also seeing a massive talent war for software engineers going on in Silicon Valley and it is spilling over into [...]
Distributed Talent, Beyond Silicon Valley
Om has a great post on Silicon Valley and the Talent Crunch. With angel funding booming and companies like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga growing like bad good talent and real estate are growing scarce again in the Valley. Yes, we cycle through boom and bust — but what I don’t understand is why we don’t learn [...]
