Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: silicon valley

  • A startup’s journey – what businesses can and can’t learn from Silicon Valley

    A startup’s journey – what businesses can and can’t learn from Silicon Valley

    Tech Crunch has a fascinating story on the journey of failed startup, Los Angeles based Flowtab that hoped to create an bar tab smartphone app.

    In many ways Flowtab is a story of our bubble economy times – a cheap, easily built service that addresses what is, at best, a minor first world problem.

    Flowtab failed when it turned out solving that problem was a lot harder than just writing an app, which is something often overlooked in the current startup hype.

    However had the timing of Flowtab’s founders been a bit luckier they could have hit the jackpot.

    Dave Winer describes the herd mentality of venture capital investors and had the hot trend of the time been bar ordering apps then the Flowtab team could have been one of the beneficiaries of the Silicon Valley business model.

    Along with being a historical insight into today’s investment mania, Flowtab’s story is an illustration of how a new business needs to pivot when the original idea turns out not to be as compelling as the founders first thought.

    Even when a business does a pivot, it’s not guaranteed the company will survive, but that’s part of the risks in starting a new enterprise, particularly when it’s undercapitalised as Flowtab was.

    There’s many lessons from Flowtab’s failure, but not all of them apply to every business.

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  • Evolving cities and Silicon Valley’s private buses

    Evolving cities and Silicon Valley’s private buses

    One of the phenomenon of Silicon Valley’s development has been the rise of the ‘Google Buses’ – the private services run by the big tech companies to shuttle their workers between home and their workplaces.

    The Bay Area’s private bus shuttles are a real time illustration of how regions evolve around industries and economies and how cities and communities are in many ways dynamic, living creatures themselves.

    An effect of the Google Buses is that San Fransisco is experiencing a ‘reverse sprawl’ notes Eric Rodenbeck in his Wired Magazine story Mapping Silicon Valley’s Gentrification Problem Through Corporate Shuttle Routes

    It’s about more than gentrification as we’ve experienced it thus far: It’s about an entirely reconfigured relationship between density and sprawl, and it’s going to need new maps to help us navigate this landscape.

    Driving those buses is instructive as well and Buzzfeed has an interview with an anonymous driver employed by one of the bus companies.  The driver’s tale shows the scale of the phenomenon.

    This bus holds 52 people and that is 52 cars that are not on the road in one trip, and we have 70 routes in our system. That’s thousands of cars everyday.

    Driving cars is fundamental to the American – and Australian – lifestyle. The modern American city developed around the motor car and that mobility is the defining feature of the Twentieth Century.

    So maybe the Google Buses are an early part of the redefinition of our cities to meet the the needs of the 21st Century and cars are not the driving factor.

    In this vein, Jarrett’s Walker’s Human Transit blog teases out some of the issues behind these developments.

    Finally, this joke is on the lords of Silicon Valley itself.  The industry that liberated millions from the tyranny of distance remains mired in its own desperately car-dependent world of corporate campuses, where being too-far-to-walk from a Caltrain station — and from anything else of interest — is almost a point of pride.  But meanwhile, top employees are rejecting the lifestyle that that location implies.

    While I don’t agree with Jarrett’s proposition that the geeks riding these buses want to mingle with strangers given the locations they live – I’d argue they’re attracted to those locations because their peers live there and downtown amenity to good restaurants and bars – he raises a very good point about the mismatch between where the workers and the jobs are.

    Jarrett’s point touches on land use zoning and its effects on the evolution of cities. An excellent piece by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic tracked Silicon Valley’s iconic techonolgy sites, most of which have been demolished due to the pollution partly caused by zoning requirements for underground tanks.

    The issue of zoning is also raised by Rodenbeck who points out that zoning issues with carparks are what has made employee buses more attractive to the giant tech employees.

    Zoning different land uses makes sense on one level as no-one wants to live next door to a tannery, heavy metal waste dump or quarry, but there’s a risk with fixed ideas that our cities will become less responsive to economic developments, particularly in an era when people don’t want to, or can’t, dive across town to get to their jobs.

    What Silicon Valley’s corporate buses really show is that our cities are evolving around the needs of today, not yesterday. It’s something governments, businesses, investors and communities should keep in mind.

    Image of Google shuttle bus stop from David Orban through Flickr

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  • Can Russia build a Silicon Valley?

    Can Russia build a Silicon Valley?

    Like many other countries, Russia is trying to build its own equivalent of Silicon Valley at Skolkovo on Moscow’s outskirts as Tech Crunch reports.

    Across the world governments are trying to find a way to replicate Silicon Valley – from London’s Tech City to Australia’s Digital Sydney, the hope is they can create the same environment that built California’s success.

    In some respects, Russia should be well placed to create their own Silicon Valley having had the same massive Cold War technology investments as the United Stated. The old Soviet system also left a deep scientific and mathematics education legacy.

    As the Tech Crunch article points out though, the Russian financial and legal systems are working against the nation with most local startups looking at incorporating in offshore havens like Luxembourg and Cyprus rather than taking their chances with the local tax laws and courts.

    If finance was the sole criteria for succeeding then Skolkovo would be almost guaranteed success with twenty billion US Dollars of private and government fundiing behind the project.

    Funding alone though isn’t enough, and most industrial hubs are the result of happy accidents of transport, natural resources and skills being found in one region.

    It might take more than a load of cash for Russia to build their own Silicon Valley, but with a shrinking and aging population the nation needs to find a way to diversify away from simply being an energy exporter.

    Image courtesy of Skolkovo Foundation through Flickr

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  • When Venture Capital meets its own disruption

    When Venture Capital meets its own disruption

    Tech industry veteran Paul Graham always offers challenging thoughts about the Silicon Valley business environment on his Y Combinator blog.

    Last month’s post looks at investment trends and how the venture capital industry itself is being disrupted as startups become cheaper to fund. He also touches on a profound change in the modern business environment.

    Graham’s point is Venture Capital firms are finding their equity stakes eroding as it becomes easier and cheaper for founders to fund their business, as a result VC terms are steadily becoming less demanding.

    An interesting observation from Graham is how the attitude of graduates towards starting up businesses has changed.

    When I graduated from college in 1986, there were essentially two options: get a job or go to grad school. Now there’s a third: start your own company. That’s a big change. In principle it was possible to start your own company in 1986 too, but it didn’t seem like a real possibility. It seemed possible to start a consulting company, or a niche product company, but it didn’t seem possible to start a company that would become big.

    That isn’t true – people like Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were creating companies that were already successes by 1986 – the difference was that startup companies in the 1980s were founded by college dropouts, not graduates of Cornell or Harvard.

    In the current dot com mania, it’s now acceptable for graduates of mainstream universities to look at starting up business. For this we can probably thank Sergey Brin and Larry Page for showing how graduates can create a massive success with Google.

    One wonders though how long this will last, for many of the twenty and early thirty somethings taking a punt on some start ups the option of going back to work for a consulting firm is always there. Get in your late 30s or early 40s and suddenly options start running out if you haven’t hit that big home run and found a greater fool.

    There’s also the risk that the current startup mania will run out of steam, right now it’s sexy but stories like 25 million dollar investments in businesses that are barely past their concept phase do indicate the current dot com boom is approaching its peak, if it isn’t there already.

    Where Graham is spot on though is that the 19th and 20th Century methods of industrial organisation are evolving into something else as technology breaks down silos and conglomerates. This is something that current executives, and those at university hoping to be the next generation of managers, should keep in mind.

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  • And your message is? How Silicon Valley wrote its own history

    And your message is? How Silicon Valley wrote its own history

    Sitting in on the Storytelling and Business panel of the Sydney Writers’ Festival it occurred to me how well Silicon Valley and the tech startup community have crafted an image for their times.

    Author of What’s Mine Is Yours, Rachel Botsman focused on the need of businesses to articulate the organisation’s sense of purpose. While this begs the question of what’s the message if the business’ purpose is to enrich their senior management, it is an a good point.

    What is a business’ purpose and how do you articulate it? More so, what is the purpose of your industry?

    One group of businesses that has done very well in articulating their message is the Silicon Valley tech community who’ve portrayed themselves – regardless of the reality – as being driven by the altruistic aim of changing the world.

    Steve Jobs was one of the leaders of this and, while we shouldn’t overlook his talents, he was a ruthless, driven businessman.

    On the panel advertising industry elder Neil Lawrence raised Jobs’ ability to articulate Apple’s mission, telling the story of when the Apple CEO was challenged on the ‘Thing Different’ slogan not being good English, he replied “it’s Californian.”

    Apple’s success in branding itself as a visionary, creative company – and Google’s image of ‘Don’t Do Evil’ – show how it’s possible to create an image for an organisation, an industry or even an entire industry.

    In reality, Silicon Valley and the tech industry are as full of snake oil salesmen, mercanaries and paper clip counting corporate bureaucrats as any other sector, but legends have been built, and continue to be built, on the myth of  selfless entrepreneurs sacrifice all to make the world a better place.

    Contrasting Silicon Valley’s success with the Australian experience was interesting, Botsman was scathing about the ability of Aussie managers in telling the story about their businesses finding most of them have lost her by the second slide of their Powerpoint presentation.

    We shouldn’t get too hung up though about the nobility of telling a business’ story, Shehan Karunatilaka, former copy writer and author made the major point about business communications “story telling in business is about shifting product.”

    He went on to describe the tragic career path of the advertising copy writer who comes into the ad industry believing they are a world changing artist and ends up being burned out.

    “you are not an artist – you are a mouthpiece for businesses” said Shehan.

    The truth is most of us in business are not artists, some parts of our work may involve creative skills – like copy writing, design or financial engineering – in reality most of us are there to make a decent living, if not a fortune.

    Silicon Valley’s mythmaking shows how you can cover the mundane truth with a noble, a constant narrative which has  allowed ruthless businessmen like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to portray themselves as selfless visionaries rather than the modern equivalents of  John Rockerfeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and other 19th Century robber barons.

    This is possibly the greatest message of all in business communications – history is written by the victors.

    When you’re winning in your industry, you get to write the story.

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