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| Home - Industry Article - Mar 05 Issue |
The New Entrepreneur
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And so the face of the New Entrepreneur has changed, quite literally. It has always been true that Silicon Valley does an exceptional job of tapping immigrant talent, generally in the product engineering function. Now we have a large and growing pool of multinational talent available to run companies and build global markets, not just develop products.
The teams that are starting successful companies these days have a much broader worldview than was common ten years ago. And increasingly, it's a worldview that includes a female perspective. Women are still a small percentage of entrepreneur teams in high tech, but the percentage is growing.
Today's startup teams also embody deeper science. Another change in the complexion of startup teams is their academic background -- teams today are much more likely to include a couple of PhDs and some world-class professors, including a Nobel laureate, or maybe two. This reflects one of the positive evolutions of the last ten years as the flow between universities and emerging technology companies has increased dramatically. In the old days, academic/industrial relations were much more narrowly focused between large corporations, such as IBM and AT&T's Bell Labs, and the major research institutions.
In the '90s, three forces changed the dynamic: the research universities began to understand that cultivating relationships with emerging technology companies could be very productive, the venture capital industry realized that there is potential gold inside the ivy-covered walls, and entrepreneurship became a credible path for PhDs that used to think of commercial activity as beneath them.
All of these changes in the profile of entrepreneurs represent an enormous return on our collective investment in the irrational exuberance of the late '90s. As a nation, we have probably spent something close to $500 billion on entrepreneur development over the past 10 years, if you consider the venture capital, corporate capital and public capital that has been spent on high tech startups during that period, not to mention the blood, sweat and tears. We tend to focus on the flood of money that was wasted on goofy ideas and flawed business models, but we have not given full respect to the value that investment has created -- not just the eBays and Broadcoms and Googles of the world, but more importantly the experience pool and the knowledge base that has been created, and the propagation of best practices throughout our economy. Ten years ago, the infrastructure for starting a tech company was highly concentrated in Silicon Valley and Boston. As far as starting a high tech company was concerned, Southern California might as well have been a foreign country -- it was challenging, to say the least. Today, the infrastructure for starting a company and making an investment in Southern California is as robust as it is in Silicon Valley. The same story applies in Seattle, Salt Lake and Phoenix -- and increasingly in Cambridge, Singapore, Shanghai and elsewhere in the world.
What does all this mean? It means that we are much better off now than we were in the '90s. We are poised for an extraordinary era of creativity and entrepreneurship, an era in which entrepreneurial energy and innovation will reach more broadly, more rapidly and more deeply than in any other era in history. Some will hesitate, and many will fail. All will confront skeptics and naysayers. But the bold will seize this opportunity and create a new generation of successful companies.
Bill Reichert is a managing director at Garage Technology Ventures, a seed-stage and early-stage venture fund in Palo Alto, California. Bill can be reached for article feedback at reichert@garage.com
 
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