The Valley and the Roundabout - a tale of two Silicons

Keynote presentation given at the November 2012 Silicon Valley comes to Imperial event at Imperial College, London

Transcript

1. The Valley and the Roundabout: a tale of two Silicons Dan Crow CTO, Songkick @crowquine
2. A bit about me BSc Comp. Sci. PhD in Artificial Intelligence Art of Memory - early UK startup Apple for 4 years 4 valley startups: Verb, Qbiquity, Guru/Unicru, Blurb Co-founder and CTO, Blurb 5 years at Google NY and London Now: CTO, Songkick
3. The valley
4. At least 3 valleys San Jose - hardware Intel, Applied Materials, AMD, National Semi Mountain View/Palo Alto - VCs, large companies Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Mozilla, LinkedIn, eBay San Francisco - consumer startups Twitter, Foursquare, Dropbox, Kickstarter, Yelp
5. Culture of the valley Optimism Risk taking Failure Innovation Openness (with exceptions) Cycle of life
6. What is a startup New company Built to scale fast Almost always tech centric
7. Irrational optimism Entrepreneurs are optimists Ignore the naysayers Believe you can change the world Believe everyone wants what you create Believe, even in the face of contrary evidence
8. Mitigated risk Risk taking is the heart of entrepreneurship Tech clusters offer risk mitigation Always another startup to go to Shared knowledge and understanding
9. Failure You learn more from failure than success The great ones pick themselves up and try again Failure is not stigmatized Fail fast Fail forward to success
10. Innovation Advances in tech Advances in product Disrupting existing markets Creating new markets Innovation comes from smart, ambitious people tackling hard problems
11. Openness Knowledge sharing explicit: meetups, hacker groups etc. implicit: people moving between companies Open source movement But guarded: competition makes people wary
12. Cycle of life Many large companies in the valley (Google, Cisco, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Adobe...) Constant stream of people starting new companies Universities (Stanford, Berkeley) generate startups Huge influx of talented workers from across the globe
13. The valley is a mindset The valley reinvents itself every decade or so: 60s hardware; 70s/80s micros; 90s web; 00s social It’s a way of thinking about the future, then creating it It’s about experimenting, failing, trying again Get the best and the brightest together, solve problems
14. The Roundabout
15. Silicon Roundabout London is the center of a new UK startup movement Started around 2007 with 10 companies Now between 500 and 1500 companies Thousands of people employed Exclusively Internet software tech
16. London success Last FM - $240M acquisition by CBS Mind Candy - over 60M users Tweetdeck - acquired by Twitter Wonga - over $100M in revenues Shazam - over 100M users Songkick - over 6M users
17. Established companies Google - over 750 employees in London Twitter - first non-US eng office Facebook - first non-US eng office Microsoft - Bing and Xbox engineering Skype - HQ in London Amazon - new engineering centre
18. Roundabout vs Valley Diversity Collaboration Mostly small companies First time entrepreneurs Evolving VC scene Monoculture Competition All sizes of company Seasoned entrepreneurs Mature VC scene
19. • Tell us who your favorite artists are and we’ll tell you when they come to your town to play live • Transforming live music with Detour • One of the original Silicon Roundabout startups • 30 people, 6M monthly uniques • We’re hiring! songkick.com/jobs