At a time when Silicon Valley seems more powerful than ever, with GAFAs and others reaching values difficult to imagine just a few years ago, at a time when Artificial Intelligence seems to scare many and fascinate others with huge fund raising for openAI ($10B) or Inflection AI ($1B) [not to forget smaller French Mistral […]
I began this blog in July 2007, so more than 15 years ago. I began my professional activity around startups in September 1997, so more than 25 years ago. So many adventures, so many great moments. And so much book reading! I revisited these pages and did an exhaustive list of the books I could […]
In 2007, I had made the same exercise, i.e. extract from the Forbes billionaire list, the ones who had a link with technology. I found by accident the 2013 Forbes list, and did the same exercise. Again the USA dominates and the word is weak. Europe has 8 whereas the USA has 63… What’s new […]
After reading The Apple Revolution, I discovered Return to the Little Kingdom, subtitled How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World. It’s not just another book about Apple for 2 reasons: it was written in 1984 so when Apple, Inc was still Apple Computer, Inc and it was written by Michael Moritz, then a journalist […]
Forbes recently published Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech’s Hottest Startup or is it its legend already? (I should thank my colleague Mehdi for mentioning the link to me, 🙂 ) It looks so similar to many of Silicon Vallley success stories that we should sometimes be a little skeptical about such beautiful stories. In […]
Silicon Valley is well known for its immigrants, particularly those from Asia (India, China, Taiwan, Korea, etc). AnnaLee Saxenian is famous for her books on the topic. The European migrants are lesser known and I think it is a little unfair. Let me first illustrate it with famous examples and then with statistical data. I […]
When Forbes published its list of billionaires, I tried to filter those who became rich through technology start-ups and I also tried to compare the USA and Europe. The following table is quite interesting. In Europe, it seems that only SAP created that level of wealth. Rank Name Country Wealth ($B) Origin Age 1 Bill […]
The content in pdf (english version) Le contenu en pdf (version française) Is the world of start-ups misunderstood? This economic phenomenon of major importance, which appeared fifty years ago in Silicon Valley near San Francisco, seems to face scepticism and even suspicion. It may still suffer from the consequences of the excesses of the Internet […]