Start-Up: the book

Triumph of the Nerds

hlebret — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:52:48 +0000

When I published Start-Up, a friend and colleague told me: “Why do you want to write something about high-tech entrepreneurship and start-ups. Nobody reads anymore. Make movies, videos!” He may have been right. Now that I heard about a new documentary about Silicon Valley and I will talk about this later in this post, it [...]

Facebook Finally Files For $5B

hlebret — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:16:21 +0000

The long-awaited filing of Facebook was finally published yesterday. Amazing numbers, amazing success. You’ll find below the capitalization table and revenue numbers I (approximately) built form the S-1 document and you can compare it to the exercise I had done in 2010. According to my analysis (I tried to take into account existing shares as well [...]

The New Silicon Valley(s)

hlebret — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:43:06 +0000

Nice series on French-speaking Swiss Radio broadcast les Temps Modernes, this week about five stimulating experiments of high-tech clusters. Probably to fight the depressing mood around WEF and the economic crisis. (And not only because I was given the opportunity this morning to comment the last case! I was only invited on Wednesday… ) Monday [...]

New IPO filings (AVG Technologies) and new start-ups stats

hlebret — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:50:02 +0000

I noticed at least 4 IPO filings this month, not bad. These are Audience, Infoblox, Millennial Media and most important to me as a European citizen, AVG Technologies. European filings in the USA are sufficiently rare to be noticed, and this time the company has Czech origins. After discussing AVG, I will show you an [...]

Innovation is not about small or large, it’s about fast.

hlebret — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:54:25 +0000

The debate is recurrent and in my last post, I was questioned about my fascination for start-ups and Silicon Valley. In a way this is related, I will come back on this at the end. Two recent articles nearly surprised me. The first one has a famous author, Clayton Christensen. The Empires Strike Back - [...]

Patents inhibit innovation, let’s delete them!

hlebret — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:44:39 +0000

My first post for 2012 is a translation of an interview I gave to French magazine La Recherche. It was published last December and you can have an electronic version of the French version here or a pdf document by clicking on the cover page below. It is followed by my own translation. Now I [...]

Drop by Drop - Keith Raffel

hlebret — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:42:16 +0000

Here is my promised second post of the day, and this one does not have stats, numbers. It’s about a thriller. A Silicon Valley Washington DC thriller. I discovered Keith Raffel while looking for books about Silicon Valley and he is probably the only author who has created his mysteries (at least two) around the [...]

When Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia co-invest(ed).

hlebret — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:20:12 +0000

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 for [...]

Darwinian and Lamarckian innovation - by Pascal Picq

hlebret — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:17:37 +0000

I enjoyed reading Un paléoanthropologue dans l’entreprise, i.e. a paleoanthropologist in the corporate world, the last book of Pascal Picq, a paleoanthropologist who explores the world of innovation. He applies his knowledge of evolution to compare two types of innovation: by simplifying, Continental Europe, rather Lamarckian and the Anglo-Saxon world and especially the United States, [...]

Darwinian and Lamarckian innovation

hlebret — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 13:18:48 +0000

If you read French, you may be interested in my post Innovation darwinienne et lamarckienne which summarizes what I understood from Pascal Picq’s Un paléoanthropologue dans l’entreprise. If you do not read French, you will have to wait until I translate my French contribution. Hopefully in a few days.