I just finished reading *The World of Startups* by Marion Flécher, and I can confirm that it’s an excellent book, even if it’s a bit depressing at times — I’ll come back to that. In a previous post, I described her comparative work between French and “Silicon” startups. But the core of her research deals, […]
In my post of November 8th, I promised to “read Marion Flécher’s book with great interest and will write to you in a future post to see if I find cause for resignation or optimism regarding the startup world.” I’m going to say both! The book is indeed excellent and perfectly describes the differences between […]
This doesn’t happen that often in a lifetime [1], so it deserves a pause: Nexthink, a spin-off from EPFL, has just been acquired for $3 billion [2] — you read that right, $3 billion!! Admittedly, Nexthink isn’t exactly young anymore; it was co-founded in September 2004, by Pedro Bados, who came (I believe, to do […]
I should go back to Silicon Valley to ask AnnaLee Saxenian what she thinks of Silicon Valley today and, more importantly, if her analysis is still valid today (which I think it is !) I fall by accident on a short 6-page article that she wrote in 1999 entitled Comment on Kenney and von Burg,‘Technology, […]
“Don’t be evil” Google (former) motto “Make something people want” Y Combinator (current) motto What a shock to discover the briefing of Y Combinator “against” Google in the U.S.’s monopoly case against the search giant. The link is here and the pdf there: I have been a fan of both entities for 20 years. But […]
It’s a podcast from France Culture that introduced me to Arte’s new series, Silicon Fucking Valley. I’ll take two sentences from it: “Stories that are sometimes well-known but always necessary to recall in order to participate in our digital culture and allow everyone to be able to decode our connected world a little” and “I […]
In my previous post, I mentioned this anthology of articles compiled by Loup Cellard and Guillaume Heuguet. Consisting of six articles (5 of which are translated) and a long introduction by the authors, it is a most interesting dive into what this region represents from a historical and political point of view. So here is […]
This post is motivated by an article by Olivier Alexandre for La Tribune. This CNRS sociologist, whom I have already mentioned here because I appreciate his analyses of Silicon Valley, summarizes an interview on his LinkedIn page entitled The tragedy is that Silicon Valley has come to push reactionary programs, La tragédie est que la […]
I am again taking advantage of the questions asked to me to write a post (after the one on the impact of the personality of founders on the success of startups). I could have titled this post “what do investors expect?”, I look here at both subjects.This time, I even copy a part of the […]
Sometimes I see striking coincidences in things which have apparently no link. It helps me in writing (useless?) posts… here the chaos of the Internet became apparent again in a trial against a startup founder, in literature and in street art, three topics which are dear to me. The trial against a startup founder is […]