By James Santagata Principal Consultant, SiliconEdge Former Wall Street Journal technology reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane has published a new book entitled, "Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs" and I'm here to posit, that without even having cracked open one page of this book she is spot on, at least with regard to her provocative title. "But wait, what? How could she be right?" "How could that title be right?" "How can you, James, be such a pompous ass to think you know anything about Apple let alone judge Kane's book by its cover?" "Doesn't Apple create magical products? It's true that Steve Jobs has passed on but the same great staff, the same great workers remain!" And all of that is true. However, to understand why the title of the book is right and why I'm right we need to honestly and objectively understand who Steve Jobs was and what made him so successful and Apple so successful under his leadership. And leadership is an operative word here. At the same time, we need to understand that competition doesn't operate in a vacuum so we must ask, "What made Apple's and Steve Jobs' competitors so timid? Why didn't they respond and counterstrike? Better yet, why didn't they create the iPhone type phone, the smartphone first?!" And the answer is simply it goes back to the structure and dynamics of office politics and power within a company. The real shock should not be that Apple, with zero experience within the mobile phone industry, built and released the blockbuster iPhone but that none of the incumbent handset makers did! Where was Nokia and their smart phone? In fact, where were the rest of the handset makers? And that is the real shock. Not that Apple made a smartphone but that the 800-pound Gorillas gave them an opening and then didn't pounce and kill or even defend their territory. However, if you've taken one of our related coaching or training sessions (How To Beat Silicon Valley's (and other) Fast-moving Startups At Their Own Game) or just intuitively understand Office Politics and Power (aka Organizational Politics & Power - OPP) this not only comes as no surprise but rather it both predicted and expected. And once you understand Office Politics and Power, you can quickly see and understand why and how Apple under Steve Jobs beat Sony to the next iteration of the Sony Walkman which became known as the Apple iPod. It helps one also understand why and how Larry Ellison discussed the Net PC (in the mid-1990's) but Apple built it (the iMac), and why Apple could add some basic design features and colors to it to make a hit while intra-company rent-seeking behavior at the competition prevented them from responding or competing let alone getting that to market first. OPP also explains why and how Jobs could do the same with Pixar while a former Disney employee, John Lasseter, who suggested as much years before Jobs ever thought about animation or rendering farms was let go (or summarily fired depending on the source one references) from Disney, only to have it all come full circle again with Disney acquiring Pixar. Go figure! And, of course, it explains some of the biggest daddy ball drops in history such as Xerox PARC and their full blown PC and related projects (which later became reflected in industry leaders like Apple, Adobe, SGI and 3Com) and Kodak with their digital camera years before the competition had one...that all went to waste... I've talked about that in detail here, about the Myths About Steve Jobs and how is personality and ethos, while celebrated within Silicon Valley (and beyond) is actually completely anathema to traditional Valley ethos. Reference: Steve Jobs: The Man Who Broke Every Myth & Meme In Silicon Valley & Become A Legend The problem then, is that a company (any company, including a post-Steve Jobs Apple) needs a strong leader who is unafraid to break eggs to make omelettes and unafraid to slaughter sacred cows for burgers or even just for fun. They also need a leader who is not just unafraid but actually enjoys and even thrills in steamrolling the competition and taking the troops straight up the middle as Alexander the Great did to Darius during one the Macedonian-Persian wars. As a further piece of evidence, one only needs to consider that the Akio Morita, the founder of Sony, was Steve Jobs while Steve Jobs was still in diapers. Moreover, Akio Morita was extremely aggressive, even actively counterattacking industry special interests who tried to have the courts block the Sony Betamax recorder. Morita was successful in defending this and in ultimately escalating this to the US Supreme Court with Sony (and consumers) coming out as the victor.
Tim Cook being the nice great guy and "steady, paint by number operator" he is (certainly he's the first guy that I would hire or consult with to determine what color doilies to lay out for my dinner party), shares none of those characteristics with either Steve Jobs or Akio Morita. So now lets move on to more questions regarding Job's selection of Cook as his successor.
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By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, SiliconEdge Well, if you haven't heard the news yet the Valley M&A buying spree continues unabated, this time with Facebook snapping up mobile messaging company WhatsApp for a hefty $16 to $19 Billion USD (depending on which news source you reference).
There are many lessons and takeaways from this acquisition but allow me to focus on just a few. 1. Ignore The Cheerleader Tech Press: WhosWhat? WhatsWho? WhatsApp! Personally, I wasn't aware of WhatsApp before this acquisition as I don't use the app and I'm mostly a user of Viber and Skype so I can be forgiven. However, within the Silicon Valley Cheerleader Press, especially Tech "Apple-Twitter-Quora" Crunch and even Pando Monthly and VentureBeat, I'm sorry but even as frequent if not habitual reader, I just didn't see the coverage. How could this be, how could they miss it, a huge multibillion dollar company? The answer is simple: Why would you expect the Cheerleader Tech Press to get it? 2. Companies Can't Pick Top Talent: It turns out that before co-founding WhatsApp, Brian Acton formerly worked at Yahoo in a quite senior / important position. After over a decade at Yahoo, he left to take some time off and then applied for a new position landing interviews with at least a few major valley tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter. However, he was rejected at both. Perhaps these rejections were due to Action being incompetent. Or perhaps Action interviewed poorly and no communication skills? Or is it perhaps more likely that these companies or at least the hiring authorities at these companies either (a) don't know how to select top-shelf talent and/or (b) allow office politics and threats to an incumbent employee's ego or career path to dictate who gets hired and who doesn't? Examples are where a senior person with top skills scares a younger or less experienced manager from making the hire -- doubt that? It happens all the time. All the time. And it costs companies millions if not billions per year. Oh and it makes you wonder, if Facebook had hired Acton, would they have gotten him to build WhatsApp for a lot less than the $19 Billion USD they paid for it? Or would WhatsApp never be built and fall into the "Innovation Lost" point below? 3. Leaderless Rather Than Leadership and Innovation Lost: Perhaps the biggest lesson is why Yahoo, which had him onboard for over 10 years didn't extract this value, this innovation It's possible that Yahoo was simply so completely leaderless and rudderless that they didn't even know what to have him do. Or perhaps he tried to be innovative and got his hands slapped. Whatever the reason, it's clear that Acton had some innovative ideas inside of him and more importantly he had the confidence and motivate to start and execute. But it's clearly not just a shame but a multi-billion dollar tragedy that Yahoo had him on the payroll all those years, had him suited up and yet would let him get in the game and swing for the fences. If you can create a company with the proper culture that has strong leadership, embraces innovation, empowers employees and hires top talent or solid talent, especially talent that either scares other firms (because it's too good) or is good inside but is a bit dinged on the outside, you're firm will do very, very well. http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/how-things-change/ By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, SiliconEdge Growth Hacking. Depending on who you listen to, it's either the fastest growing "new" field of marketing or one of the most over inflated of buzz words. My take as a "classically-trained marketer" is this: It ain't nothing new. It's just a form or better yet an updated framework for direct response advertising. That being said, I do think that term can be / could be useful as a short hand term for: "A super-focused, super-aggressive form of Direct Response Advertising where your ass, your paycheck and your company's survival is on the line everyday, and whereby the marketing campaigns that you develop and run must be done so on a compressed time scale with a limited to non-existent budget." Other than that, Growth Hacking can be said to be the same "stuff", different pile. By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, SiliconEdge We hear so much about the supposed power of innovation and creativity. That these qualities or skill sets are somehow both unique and scarce. And at the same time, a lack of innovation and creativity is often quickly blamed for the downfall or underperformance of a company or organization. But is this really true? And more importantly, how much impact do innovation and creativity or their lack thereof really have on an organization? Here's the real deal: Innovation & creativity are highly overrated and badly misunderstood. If these were so vitally important, then Xerox PARC would have been and still would be the most successful company in the world while Microsoft would perhaps be the least successful. But it didn't turn out that way because... Well, because innovation and creativity are both meaningless and worthless without the ability to productize them. And productization is both meaningless and worthless without the ability to monetize it. And monetization can't happen without a strong leadership. Strong leadership is required to allow, enable and drive an organization to productize and then monetize its innovation and creativity. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Over the last twenty years, and accelerating in the last 7 years, not only Japan but the entire world has begun to question Japan's ability to innovate and create as companies such as Apple and Samsung rule Japan's former stomping grounds and gleefully gorge themselves on Japanese companies' bento boxes on a daily basis. Meanwhile, once mighty and innovative Japanese firms like Sony and Panasonic bleed red and constantly try to slough off workers while peddling a staid if uninspiring set of "me-too" and "also-ran" product lines. How far has Sony fallen? Well, it's gotten to be so bad that if Sony founder, Akio Morita, were to magically re-appear today and venture over to the front entrance of Sony Japan, he wouldn't recognize the place. Worse, if he then decided to apply for a position, not only wouldn't they hire him, they'd most likely call security and have him escorted off the premises. But all is not lost. In our No Box Thinking™ (Volume 3), entitled "How Struggling Japanese Companies Can Beat Silicon Valley's Fast-moving Startups At Their Own Game" we go through exactly what has happened, what has changed and how, in a short time and by using some talent management adjustments, Japanese firms can again perform at our above that of their competitors. By James Santagata Principal Consultant, SiliconEdge Hats off to Sheryl Sandberg and her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. It's started a valuable conversation but until concrete actions are taken, that's all it is - a conversation, talk. And by concrete actions I mean focusing on understanding, developing and utilizing specific tools and strategies to accept the world as it is, and then to use these tools and strategies to create, mold and reframe a new more comfortable and productive reality. Because Leaning-In Isn't Always EnoughThis training draws extensively from our Psychological Jujutsu training and High-Impact Leadership series to create a body of original material that is specifically tailored for women currently in or seeking leadership roles.
We delve deeply into the fine line separating the 4B's -- Bimbo, Babe, Bitch, Brilliant-Boss -- and more importantly we discuss exactly how to effectively place yourself and stay in the Brilliant-Boss category without triggering negative push backs, mismatches or attacks. By understanding the impact and deeply embedded, yet invisible, role that evolutionary psychology plays with regard to the organization and society's view of strong women leaders, we'll explore how to deftly avoid the many traps and pitfalls while learning how to push the correct buttons and trigger the proper scripts allowing women to lead an more effective, efficient, productive and satisfying work and home life. By James Santagata Principal Consultant, SiliconEdge It seems like the peddling of the old standby Myths & Memes is on the rise once again in the Valley. As this is often a lagging indicator of both the Valley's, and even the wider Tech Industry's financial state, it tells me that we're in a very frothy if not overheated market since people are now letting their hair down and apparently gleefully throwing themselves onto the politically correct bandwagon. But they should be careful, lest they find themselves thrown beneath it. Still, it's my guess that whatever problems or disasters may rear their ugly heads in the future due to blind belief and adherence to these Myths & Memes, the folks most involved are betting that they'll be able to quickly paper over it with the waves and waves of cash that are flowing so freely now. But not everyone believed let alone followed these Myths and Memes and amazingly, they didn't fail or turn into a pumpkin or a toad. What a perfect example of a person who broke every one of these Myths and Memes? Try Steve Jobs. Yep, Steve Jobs. And Apple Computer under his guidance during his second tour of duty. The fact is, no one can deny that, under Steve Jobs, Apple was a smashing success. All the metrics are there: market cap, profits, amazing hit product after hit product. iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone. You name it. Wow! And for the record, I am by no means an Apple fan nor am I a Steve Jobs / Apple Computer apologist. I'm simply a reality-based thinker and I call it the way it is, not the way I wish it were. That said, I'm a very serious student of Steve Jobs and I'm not afraid to look at what really made him successful. I can tell you, it wasn't following the Valley Myth and Memes and it wasn't being politically correct. In fact, Steve Jobs did the exact opposite of what most pundits and social engineers are preaching. And the reason it worked for Steve Jobs is because Steve Jobs and his communication style was perfectly aligned with the way the world and humans work. What is most interesting, though perhaps very disconcerting to the social engineers among us, is how Steve Jobs did it. We're told that if a person studies hard at the "right" schools, gets a "good" education and makes the "right" connections they'll be well positioned for success. Beyond that we are told, especially in the Valley, that an organization will perform best when it is openly transparent (both internally and externally), when there is diversity, when there are women in senior leadership positions and when we have an open environment of respect and perhaps kumbayahism in the office. Going even further, we are told that we should be investing and building all kinds of new tech that people have never seen. And by "new tech" I mean core tech, not making sexy cases, new form factors or tinkering with some incremental derivative product like the iPod. And yet, if we look at Steve Jobs and his management style during his absolutely, amazing and record smashing second run we find something that is completely at odds with what the pundits say is necessary for success: 1. No diversity at Apple (as defined by the politically correct sense of skin pigmentation / reproductive organs). 2. No women in senior leadership positions (see also: Apple Vows To Find Women & Minorities For Board Directors). 3. No Indians in senior leadership positions (see: Why Indian presence in Apple's senior management level is next to nil). 4. Few minorities (see: Apple Facing Criticism About Diversity Changes Bylaws). 5. Steve Jobs didn't go to a "top" university. 6. Steve Jobs didn't even graduate from a four-year college. 7. Steve Jobs was not transparent. At best, he could be characterized as a benevolent dictator, at worst a tyrant. 8. Jobs/Apple was not open -- you leak new Apple products, you'd be hunted down & sued (see: Apple Sues To Stop Product Leaks). 9 Jobs/Apple could be downright nasty, even engaging in potentially illegal activity, if the "no poach" collusion allegations are borne out. 10. Steve Jobs even used his money to find a loophole in California vehicle code so that he wouldn't have to get license plates and had an apparent penchant for parking in the handicap spaces. And yet again, while Steve Jobs just turned a blind eye to all of these supposed business and organizational "requirements" his results were phenomenal. Can we in any way argue with Steve Jobs' success? It seems that few prominent members of the Valley tech community question his success so I guess not. Next time, we'll dig a bit deeper and explore why Steve Jobs was so successful, time and time again. The results may surprise you. Lastly, as quick exercise, we should ask ourselves is Apple really lacking diversity? Or is and has Apple always been diverse but in a more mature manner, such as defining "diversity" with regard to value, thought patterns and productivity rather than with regard to skin pigments and reproductive organs?. It can easily be argued that a man and women studying the same subject matter from Princeton (not to pick on any school) will be more alike than two men, one of which studied electrical engineering and the other who studied marketing at two different schools in two different states or countries. Think about it. Think. Different. By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, SiliconEdge Select, develop, deploy & manage your people right & you can have the advantages of a high-tech economic center right at home. Simply hearing the words Silicon Valley can evoke an image of cutting-edge innovation advanced by an army of daring, if not slightly mad, entrepreneurs who feverishly seek to develop the world’s next technological marvels. But what exactly makes Silicon Valley so successful and, more importantly, can it be replicated? China has Zhong Guan Cun, India has Bangalore. Where is Japan's “Silicon Valley”? Japan, the third largest economy in the world, still lacks any type of large, formal tech epicenter like the one in California. Does this even matter for business success in the 21st century? Many people, including Silicon Valley industry insiders, will immediately and perhaps misguidedly say yes. A more reasoned and introspective analysis, however, demonstrates that this type of success is not about location but more importantly about talent. And even more specifically: it is not just about talent, but about how that talent is selected, developed, deployed and managed. To create a Silicon Valley atmosphere, a company needs employees who possess these three skills: 1. Business acumen to identify huge opportunities; 2. Leadership to seize those opportunities; and 3. The ability to select, develop, deploy and manage talent to quickly exploit these opportunities. Once we understand this, what then are the core skills that we should be focusing on when developing talent that can rise to and perform at the level of Silicon Valley’s? If we look closely, it’s clear that this boils down to five core skills, all of which can be readily developed in our existing employees: 1. Leadership: The ability to take risks, to develop a vision and to lead others to the successful path. This is not just for senior leaders, but for all key players so that they can learn how to lead across all levels: from senior management to their peers or to those below them. And it includes the ability to reframe what are commonly perceived as failures as mistakes and missteps with important lessons to learn. Steve Jobs had success in a variety of diverse areas and products, from the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iTunes and Pixar. This wasn’t accidental nor was it surprising, as each of these areas was ripe for a true leader to identify and then pluck the low hanging, yet massive fruit. His move into iTunes alone was pure leadership as he had to overcome the lawsuit Apple had lost to the Beatles record label prohibiting engagement in music-related businesses. His success with iPod was further made possible by Sony’s reluctance to move its Walkman franchise forward into developing solid state devices including technologies such as microprocessor chip, crystalline semiconductors and RAM. 2. Communication: The ability to clearly communicate through a variety of media ranging from one-on-one and group meetings to formal reports and presentations to business emails and video conferences. Very often, the best ideas as well as the pulse of the market comes from those closest to the customer – support engineers, sales and customer service. And yet, most often this information does not get captured and clearly communicated back to product managers and the executive staff (see also Ogushi Matrix Communication lines). 3. Influence & Persuasion: The ability to get others to want to support a project or, if they won’t actively support it, to at least make sure that they don’t actively resist it. Previously we mentioned the need to capture and clearly communicate opportunities and obstacles a company may face or is facing. Yet, there are plenty of instances where even a clearly communicated issue or opportunity falls on deaf ears, such as Kodak’s need to move from film-based to digital cameras. There are many reasons for resisting opportunities or ignoring warnings about obstacles, including that this information or proposed shift in business may benefit the company but specifically expose or harm one person’s or department’s operations, ego, status or bonuses. For this reason, clear communication is only a starting point. Beyond this, influence and persuasion must be utilized as well. 4. Negotiation: The ability to negotiate not only externally but, often more importantly, internally. This is critical during situations such as when a green light is needed for a feasibility study, to request funds and resources for product development or to get approval and buy in for the launch of a product that will potentially cannibalize an existing cash cow product. Influence and persuasion can only take us so far, and at some point it can be expected that we will need to negotiate. This requires the ability to craft a win-win solution as well as to ensure that the other party sees it that way. It is not only possible but extremely common for a win-win to be misperceived and subsequently blocked, simply because the other person has become psychologically opposed resulting in a classic “cut your nose off to spite your face” scenario. In these scenarios everyone loses including employees, managers, shareholders and customers. 5. Assertiveness: The ability and confidence to speak up and share opinions or ideas or to challenge another’s opinions or ideas in a professionally affirmative manner. Assertiveness (often confused with aggressiveness) is a critical skill that is especially important for those who may have key insights and knowledge, such as engineers or service people, but not the personality or interest in speaking out nor the title or standing within the company. Instilling this skill in a firm’s employees can unleash great productivity and opportunity while also identifying problems or obstacles before they become dangerous or expensive. By developing these 5 core skills sets and Valley Values in your existing talent you will ensure that your employees’ inherent creativity and innovative nature do not go to waste and that the people with these ideas have the tools and skills needed to bring this forth to their peers and superiors and ultimately to the market place. By James Santagata Principal Consultant, SiliconEdge Coming across entitled, "Foreign startups in Silicon Valley still a rarity" I immediately asked myself two questions: a. Why is that? (first thought: money & visas) b. Does it even matter to be in the Valley now? I first moved to the Valley at the end of January, 1995 and although it seems like yesterday I'm still amazed to see how far both the internet and technology in general have come in terms of their capability and diffusion into our society. For instance, while many newspapers at ground zero of the dot com boom, such as the San Jose Mercury News, used to worry and fret about the so-called "digital divide", we see how misguided those worries were as even the Bloods and Crips have made great use of Facebook, Twitter and other online media and communication services. The fact is, these once nascent and intriguing technologies have now become deeply embedded in our daily existence to the very point that although we rely on them for the most mundane tasks, they have effectively become invisible to us. In fact, they only time we do notice the technology that we've come to rely on is when it fails to work or breaks such as during a blackout. Over the last 18 to 20 years (and especially in the last 7 years) the skills and knowledge need to quickly and cost effectively build and mass produce these technologies and tools have now become all but common place. Moreover the amount of computing power (and bandwidth) we have stuffed into just our smart phones is mind boggling as is the ability to buy right off the shelf parts and services of most of the things we need to create just about any product or business and to do so immediately. We are now longer concerned with the theory or possibility behind building a router or the design and development of a packet switched (rather than circuit based) networks. It's done and proven. Similarly, IPTV is no longer a dream but a reality. I could go on and on but I won't bore you. Beyond core technology, the Valley has grown and matured in the knowledge, processes, skills and resources needed to not only build a product but to launch a company and to make it successful (although, often times, the Valley still greatly struggles with market-based productization and ultimately the monetization of the product. These two sticking points, by the way, provide huge opportunities for the next generation of entrepreneurs to focus on. It's again hard to believe, but much of this was only possible in the late 1990's and again in the mid 2000's. First, we had the explosion of open source software, from Linux to MySql to Perl to PHP to Python and beyond with various applications available to all. This was coupled with the continuing march forward of technology-price improvements where the price point of servers, routers, SANs and bandwidth plummeted as the power, stability, ease of use and ubiquity rocketed upward. The knowledge of how to set these up and admin them diffused as well -- from the US and Western developed countries into developing countries and even as far as to the pimply-faced high-school kid across the street who could setup or administer your Linux server. This helped pushed the total cost of ownership (TCO) of these technologies down even further, and making them even more ubiquitous and more intertwined in our lives, whether we knew it or not. This continued after the Dot Com Boom (or Dot Com Crash depending on your point of view), however, around 2005 and 2006 something else happened. We began to see huge improvements in both the knowledge, formation and management of startups and venture capital investments. Once opaque and arcane industries, terms and activities such as the VC industry, the meaning of the terms on a term sheet (such as a liquidity preference or cramdown) as well as the funding raising process itself become transparent, almost overnight!. What was once at best, Tribal Knowledge regarding the startup process and how best to anticipate and overcome common obstacles and business threats soon became openly discussed, then codified and finally shared widely to the point that by reading perhaps 15 bloggers in a variety of thematic areas as well as perhaps 30 additional books, a fairly intelligent person running a startup or looking to launch a startup could go from Newbie to low-level Sage in a matter of 3 to 6 months. With all of these aforementioned changes as well as the codification and diffusion of knowledge it begins to beg the question, "Is being in Silicon Valley even important anymore?" I would say it was 10 years ago. The knowledge, what there was of it, was very silo-ed as well as tribal and often very anecdotal in nature. But now with all of the knowledge, mentors, books, forms, templates and so on I question that. Further, most of the "tech pain" and "tech risk" has been taken out of the equation. No longer do you need to rent some space at some sketchy colo at a former bomb shelter in San Jose or Mountain View where you need to provision your own rack and where you rack is separated from the next customer's rack by some chicken wire (anyone remember Best Internet on Winchester Blvd that sported the chicken wire colo cages?) Heck, you no longer even have to physically be there. Better yet, provisioning happens at the click of a button and almost immediately. And with cloud-based services like Amazon's AWS, scalability isn't a problem either. Only the cash to pay for it. In effect, so many of these startups are post-tech. Sure, these startups use tech, just as KFC, Walmart or UPS does, but those firms aren't tech firms either. Even vaunted Silicon Valley startups like Airbnb and Uber aren't tech firms. Netflix may be now that it's streaming media, but before that, it was a mail order rental house for DVDs. And what about Groupon? Is that a tech play? Now of this makes any of these startups "less" or "more" of a startup as it is simply a reality of where the startup world is today. So why should you be in the Valley? Well, some people will do it just for a challenge -- you won't find a more concentrated community of super-switched on, open-minded, openly-sharing people anywhere. Sure there are great communities like it everywhere, but not at the scale that the Valley offers. In some cases, it's critical to see, learn and reset yourself to what "Valley time" really means. A crushing rush forward. Sure, you can do that anywhere, in any city in the world, but you'll be looked at as "weird". And it's fantastic to benchmark yourself against other world-class competitors. In the Valley, you come to see that as normal, because all your friends and co-workers will be doing the same thing. For me, I'm glad I lived in the Valley and I still do business there. It was a very huge turning point and critical chapter in my life. However, for many reasons, not everyone can get there, at least now. Yet they worry and fret about it. My advice, is don't worry or fret, do the best you can, with what you have, where you are. If the Valley is in your future you'll be there. And beyond that, there is a downside to the Valley -- too many people acting like entrepreneurs attending events and conferences rather than building product or businesses. It's also a huge echo-chamber. Those are major downsides. Even if you aren't there, you can still read and see what's going on, without being pulled into the echo-chamber and backslapping "ataboys" that are often made with good intentions but inadvertently damage companies or entrepreneurs in the long run. Foreign startups in Silicon Valley still a rarity
Summary: Asian programmers may be a common sight in Silicon Valley, but foreign entrepreneurs are practically a rarity, says Valley-based accelerator. By Victoria Ho for Starting Up Asia December 5, 2013 -- 08:58 GMT (00:58 PST) Asian programmers may be a common sight in Silicon Valley, but foreign entrepreneurs are practically a rarity, according to Ben Levy, a partner at BootstrapLabs. "If you start digging into how many of the foreign entrepreneurs that go through them manage to stay in Silicon Valley, the number might be close to zero or in the single digit percentage," he said. Foreign startups in Silicon Valley still a rarity, according to BootstrapLabs.Levy, who is based in the Bay Area, said foreign entrepreneurs who try to set up shop in the Valley—even those who manage to go through prestigious programs with Y Combinator or 500 Startups—almost never manage to stay on. Of course, Levy was speaking from the perspective of BootstrapLabs, whose raison d'etre is to bring foreign startups to the Valley in the first place. But his point is supported by several high-profile tech CEOs who have been pushing for immigration reform in the U.S., in order to attract more tech-savvy workers to the country. In March, over 100 tech executives including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, HP CEO Meg Whitman, Intel CEO Paul Otellini and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, signed a letter urging President Obama to relax immigration laws especially for highly-skilled workers into the U.S. Levy said the missing piece for many startups wanting to stay is the need to have sufficient funding while they build relationships, without having to start out from ground zero "begging for money" already. While many may have landed in Silicon Valley with some seed funding, follow-on funding can be a challenge for those new to the scene, he said. Founded in 2008, BootstrapLabs has been active in relocating startups to the Valley, including Zerply and Witsbits from Sweden, and Budapest's Prezi, for example. Recently however, it's started to plant roots in Asia, with partnerships with accelerators in South Korea and Malaysia. Earlier this week, it announced a tie-up with Seoul-based Coolidge Corner Investment (CCVC), to set up a program in Seoul for Korean startups. CCVC manages a US$22 million fund. The visa is not subjected to the same restrictions as the broader H1B visa for most foreign workers into the States, and has allowed Varun to avoid some of the waiting time and regulatory hoops after Semantics3 finished its term with Y Combinator last year. By James Santagata Principal Consultant, Silicon Edge In a recent blog post entitled "How to Deal with Pure Recruiting Mistakes", Mark Suster, a partner at Upfront Ventures gives his take on fixing recruiting or hiring mistakes. He has written some other posts on the subject as well in terms of hiring and firing fast. In regards to hiring and firing fast, I want to be clear and fair that his post is primarily referring to startups (whose needs may be well different than a large, more established company) and is not a "just pull anyone in and see who makes it" mentality. There is a lot of merit in moving quickly in the hiring process, in fact, many companies lose key talent because they move to slow. This slowness in hiring often comes from several factors which may include an overly subjective interview process, the inability to get all people to agree to a hire (e.g,. a group decision) or "cock-blocking" office politics. What I want to do today, is to delve a little deeper into why recruiting mistakes happen. Why are people hired who don't work out? Is it skills, attitude, cultural fit or some other factor or combination? There are many factors and they come from both sides of the table -- the candidate's side and the hiring firm's side. Each situation is different (ESID), but we can usually boil it down to several factors: 1. The candidate doesn't have the aptitude (skills). 2. The candidate doesn't have the attitude (mind set and motivation). 3. The candidate doesn't mesh / can't find his or her way in the corporate culture. That is, it moves too fast or too slow for the candidate. 4, The company improperly assessed the candidates skills sets and fit. 5. The company selected the candidate to fail (e.g,. "Rank & Yank" and this candidate is the group's Sacrificial Lamb). 6. The company applied a selection shortcut -- "Oh he worked at XYZ company, must be good..." 7. The candidate's new peers or one peer sees the new hire as threat and works to remove (have fired) him or her. Of these factors, #6 is perhaps the most critical error (along with #4) when we make hiring decisions quickly. What happens is that unless we know exactly how to interview AND are interested in a very objective, brass-tacks assessment of how the candidate really is rather than how we'd wish would be or hope the candidate is, we will get fooled and made bad decisions. Most often this happens when we rely on Social Proof, assume the Portability of Talent (namely, the inability to identify and separate the success of the candidate from the success or support provided by the system, company or brand) and engage in Trait Ascription Bias while applying the Just World Hypothesis (sometimes known as Just World Theory, Fallacy or Phenomenon. It's a cognitive bias). Two of the more insidious reasons the wrong hires occur is when the hiring authority's (or future peer group's) ego as well as internal politics are injected into the hiring and assessment process. This is a killer. Often resulting in hiring the wrong talent, while driving away and 86'ing the key talent. Here's a quickly illustration of several of these factors at play simultaneously. And just for the record, please don't read anything into the universities or companies that I have chosen to illustrate this with. They were simply chosen because of their impact in terms of having or lacking social proof and so on. Mishire Example: Hiring Manager / Hiring Authority: "Hey, this candidate is a stud/studette. He/she was the Sales Director at Google so he'd/she'd make the perfect first hire for our startup sales team." Mishire Analysis: When you're selling for Google or IBM among other well-known firms, you'll find that about 90% of the sales mojo comes from your brand, team and resources. Conversely, when you're selling from Puntster Analytics from Podunk. Iowa, it's all about your game and skills -- pure talent. Similar mishires are also clearly seen when hiring shortcuts are taken by hiring from direct competitors (or hiring industry insiders) and misattributing their past successes to the candidate rather than seeing what the system provided. Conversely, an excellent person may be turned away and they often are, because their stats aren't as good BUT their stats are the result of Jedi-level talent in the face of a poor brand or system. Yet they are rejected. There are countless other examples, but another common one is the filtering out or rejecting of highly-qualified talent because the current interviewers or team see the candidate as a clear and present danger and threat to someone's salary, position, title and/or ego on the team. How to Deal with Pure Recruiting Mistakes
Posted on November 27, 2013 by Mark Suster One of the unavoidable realities of building a startup is having to fire people. In a normal business you can often sweep bad performers under the rug and not deal with them. When you have millions or billions of dollars of revenue you can suffer a few bad performers or bad apples. You can miss a quarter’s target and not cull the inefficiencies. I’m not saying you should, but you could. But in startups this equals death. Death because just 3 extra non-performing employees in a company of 15 can either accelerate cash out date or can dramatically lower your productivity. I’ve spoken about this before and my mantra, “Hire Fast, Fire Fast.” When I first started my career I came across a term for this that has always stuck in my head and serves as a useful reminder of this mantra. We called it “PURE.” Previously. Undetected. Recruiting. Error. |
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