Tom Perkins is one of the icons of Silicon Valley. I have not read yet his new autobiography but Andre Mercanzini, a colleague at EPFL, just mentioned to me an interesting podcast from VentureVoice. Here is Perkins’ views about why Silicon Valley is unique: The difference is in psychology: everybody in Silicon Valley knows somebody […]
I promised more about Straight Talk for Startups in my previous post which was describing the book first part. After Mastering the Fundamentals, which is indeed a fundamental must-read, his part II about Selecting the Right Investors is as good. But before describing these 13 new rules, let me jump directly to rule #100: Learn […]
I end 2012 with two posts related to my beloved Silicon Valley. This one is about the two great Venture Capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. The next one will be about Palo Alto-based author of thrillers, Keith Raffel. I have already said a lot about these two firms. You can […]
Was the information provided in episode 1 correct? I decided to try and contact Tom Perkins, the famous VC and he answered! “I looked at the data you sent but, honestly, I don’t know where they came from. We have never given this sort of thing out, and we would have a lot of trouble […]
This morning I was at a big meeting of the French innovation ecosystem and after a presentation about support to entrepreneurship, I took the liberty of asking a question about the importance given to entrepreneurs in residence, to serial entrepreneurs, but also to the idea of bringing together researchers and students in science and technology […]
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 […]
Friends from IMF sent me a link to a very interesting article entitled How Unique is VC’s American History?. You may have access to it here or there. It is an analysis of a book, Tom Nicholas’ VC: An American History that I have not read (yet). But the article is quite fascinating about the […]
Mallaby is a marvelous storyteller – thanks to his team probably as he mentions at least 15 collaborators in his acknowledgments. This is part 3 of my posts about the Power Law, following part 2 and part 1. You will discover so many figures of venture capital and entrepreneurship that it would be impossible to […]
This is the title of a great article from the not less great New Yorker, dated November 23, 2020 and written by Charles Duhigg: How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism, Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up. The V.C. firm Benchmark helped enable WeWork to make one wild mistake after […]
You will find part I here and part II there. If the 60s were the early days which ended with the oil crisis in 73, the maturity came in the 80s with a second crisis coming from Japanese competition. There was still a lot of uncertainty as the authors show in the chapters dedicated to […]