New Reply

Post a Reply

Thread: For Newcomers in Silicon Valley, the Dream of Entrepreneurship Still Lives

Title: (100 characters at most)

Content: ( 3,000 characters at most, please )

You can add emoticons below to your post by clicking them.

[quote=GROWTHRING,461452]“I might be losing two years of salary, but no risk, no reward,” said Mr. Lee, who still receives regular queries from recruiters at Facebook and Google but pays himself $2,000 a month and shares a house with co-workers at Loki Studios, the company he founded.

“It’s a nice dream to have: If I didn’t have to answer to anybody, if I could run my own company,” he said. “Everyone has a friend who was at a start-up and made their own fortune, and everybody is curious if they could do it, too.”

Still, making billions of dollars is not what propels him, Mr. Lee said. “The long hours, the stress, the roller coaster — if that’s your primary reason, you’re going to burn out so quickly,” he said.

Randy Komisar, a venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur, says the cavalier attitude of some young entrepreneurs worries him, and he wonders if they have the grit and resilience to cope if boom turns to bust.

“I think there’s something as too much self-esteem,” Mr. Komisar said. “Everybody is doing their app, and everybody is doing a start-up, and everybody has raised a million dollars.”

Most, he said, “have no clue how to connect the dots” to create a sturdy, long-term product.

“My guess is that at some point the music stops and we find out that there’s not just one less chair but hundreds of thousands of less chairs, and we’ll have thousands of kids who haven’t learned anything because they’re all expecting to learn from each other,” he said.

Professor Roberts, who has watched enrollment in computer science courses shoot up in the last year — a class that last spring had 70 students now has 200 — is less concerned. The newest crop of Silicon Valley hopefuls, he said, are “interested in making enough money, but the crazy multiple millions of dollars that no one can spend, that I don’t think is driving as much of the equation as it used to be. Increasingly, there are people who want to work on technology because they see that as a way to help people in the world who just aren’t benefiting from that technology.”

In fact, as a group of former and current Facebook employees, including Ms. Oluwole and Mr. Schauffer, dined on ahi tacos and rock shrimp tempura at Umami in Cow Hollow on a recent evening, it was Bill Gates who was singled out as a role model, his bank account a definite plus but his philanthropy more important.

“Hitting the lottery is secondary to making a change,” Mr. Schauffer said.

[/quote]

characters left

Name:

Get a new code