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Silicon Valley, that geographic stretch of the San Francisco Bay Area, is to the computer technology world what Rome is to the Catholic world or Mecca to the Islamic world: Anything that the seers there say is treated as gospel and above questioning. That should not be a surprise since the Silicon Valley is the home of Facebook, Google, and Apple, not to mention a vast number of other world-leading tech businesses.
Early in this book, the author, Alexandre Lazarow declares the intention to “Question the Silicon Valley Gospel”. In fact, he goes so far as to say that the Silicon Valley may be about to have its “Detroit Moment”: The disappearance of Detroit, which in the 1950s had the world’s top three global companies Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, but which has since then been superseded by Japanese (Toyota), German (Volkswagen) and Korean (Hyundai) companies.
The discussion in this book is urgently relevant today, more so in India, because the word “Startup” is on every policymaker’s lips because they suddenly see them as solving the problem of highly educated graduates not getting jobs either in the shrinking traditional Indian engineering industries or in that great job-palliative of the early 2000s, the IT service body shops.
This book is filled with inspiring examples of technology company success stories founded in places other than in Silicon Valley and countries other than the United States.
M-PESA, a Kenya -based mobile phone -based payment platform is his first example. Gojek, from Indonesia is a ride-hailing service, targeted at that unique Indonesian phenomenon, the “Ojek”, a low-cost motorbike taxis, which quickly get you to where you want to go, weaving in and out of Jakarta’s chaotic, super-congested traffic.
The author analyses some of Silicon Valley’s myths that have become religion-like beliefs in venture investing circles throughout the world.
The “unicorn” is one such all-pervasive myth and refers to the elusive object, a startup that quickly achieves a valuation of $1 billion. He points out that the term unicorn does not simply mean the end-result of having a $1 billion valuation but “represents a philosophy, an ethos and a process of building startups...and serves as a rallying cry...”
It symbolises a startup’s single-minded goal of growing fast, an all-or-nothing focus. In practice, as the author points out, this may not only be impractical but unjustifiable.
Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs - from Delhi to Detroit - Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley
Author: Alexandre Lazarow
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press Price: Rs 1,250
The other stereotype that Silicon Valley thrives on, as the author points out, is that of a 22-year-old college dropout building a gigantic company starting in a garage: The examples that support this stereotype are real enough: Steve Jobs founded Apple at 21, Bill Gates founded Microsoft at 21, Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at 20. In a sense, Silicon Valley's ageism, the belief in startup’s founded by a 20-year-old is not statistically true, the author points out. He quotes data showing that most successful startups in the United States are founded by entrepreneurs in their mid-40s and they started their businesses after 20-plus years of work experience.
Again, as the author points out, what is not often reported or sung to is that 80 per cent of all unicorns in the United States so far have had an immigrant in a key executive position, and this includes Uber, WeWork and Zoom, among others.
Let us pause for breath here. The world is as full of “How To” books on making a success of startups as there are startups. Some of the more prominent ones are: Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don’t.
There have even been a bunch from India as well: Rashmi Bansal’s Connect the Dots,Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari and Larry Sambas’s From Startup to IPO, to name just a few of the many.
What makes this book different? For one, most startup books follow the same Silicon Valley cliché: That the goal of a startup founder has to be to grow quickly and sell the business for an eye-watering amount to whoever you can find, which are often American entities, and which is also why the Indian startup scene essentially feeds the expansion plans of US companies.
Mr Lazarow looks at broader issues so his book is likely to be of interest for policymakers and thinkers as well. He has several excellent ideas for re-inventing finance, for example, that will help finance escape its moronic goal of shareholder value maximisation. He also has suggestions for societal-level initiatives that will help lay the foundations of an entrepreneur- fostering ecosystem in a country like India.
ajitb@rediffmail.com
