Citigroup took a big hit yesterday, as its new CEO Michael Corbat announced the company’s intention to lay off 11,000 employees and “pull back in emerging markets” in an effort to cut costs amidst challenging times for big banks. According to Bloomberg, this represents a 4.2 percent reduction of Citi’s total workforce and hits hardest in trading, investment banking and transaction services groups… → Read More
Editor’s note: Dr. Paul Judge is a serial entrepreneur and investor. He is Chief Research Officer at Barracuda Networks, co-founder and Chairman of Pindrop and Limitless Smart Shot, and previously led three companies to successful exits.
A few months ago Facebook’s initial public offering became the largest tech IPO in history, initially valuing the company at over $100 billion. Over 70… → Read More
I just got back to San Francisco from the 15-year celebration of LIVESTRONG, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. It was an interesting time to be in Austin, as most of the world is still shell-shocked from Armstrong stepping down as the Chairman due to outside pressure from his doping scandal. However, most people had a positive attitude when it comes to the direction that LIVESTRONG is going in, but… → Read More
Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. He blogs at http://scott.a16z.com and you can follow him on Twitter @W_ScottWeiss.
People often ask me what the best path to becoming a successful entrepreneur is: “Should I go try and start a company now? Or go to grad school? How about… → Read More
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 20-city event series hosted around the world to help educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. He’s an ex-Electronic Arts employee, as well as the founder of Commonred and Vaporware Labs.
Until a few weeks ago I’d never met Dave McClure. Like many of you I have read all about him, casually Twitter followed him… → Read More
When Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard in the summer of 2004, he didn’t move his fledgling company to the mountains, or the Gulf of Mexico, or San Francisco, he moved to Silicon Valley. Well, Palo Alto to be precise. In an interview with Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston last year, he said of his impression of Silicon Valley, “You get this feeling that you need to be out here.” Many founders are… → Read More
Last week, Yahoo announced that it would cut 2,000 jobs. Given the employee shortage in Silicon Valley, most of the qualified engineers that lost their jobs in this round of cuts will likely land on their feet pretty quickly. For those who just had enough of the Valley, though, Detroit-based Quicken Loans and its family of companies is offering these former Yahoo employees (and anybody else who… → Read More
Navarrow Wright, the co-founder of Global Grind and current CTO of InteractIve One, which operates BlackPlanet.com and other sites, came into the TCTV studio to have “the race conversation” with me.
“It is a meritocracy at some level,” Wright acknowledges. “I think the challenge is how do you get involved in that ecosystem.” One of the biggest barriers for black tech entrepreneurs is a… → Read More
Being from Jordan and having visited Silicon Valley on a number of occasions, this visit (along with others) continue to show how the realities of the Valley stand in stark contrast with what an emerging world founder, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, face to start and scale a Web business.
I believe the lack of a well-developed ecosystem (funding, mentoring, risk culture… → Read More
As TechCrunch readers know by now, I speak my mind and don’t shy away from controversy. I am even more provocative when I talk to students. My goal is to make them think outside the box. I encourage students not only to challenge authority, but also to challenge me. I tell them that with my research on globalization, entrepreneurship, and U.S. competitiveness, I am learning as I go; no one has… → Read More
Living in Silicon Valley, one gets used to meeting people who are optimistic and who talk about changing the world. But as I lamented in this piece about the Valley’s obsession with Facebook and Twitter apps, most of its entrepreneurs either think too small or are focused on the wrong things. So, even though I am enthusiastic about its ability to take risks and innovate, I’ve been skeptical… → Read More
After visiting Okinawa, Japan, and meeting with global experts on innovation, I’ve come to the conclusion that Silicon Valley’s greatest advantage isn’t its diversity; it is the fact that it accepts and glorifies failure. Like many other countries, Japan has tried replicating Silicon Valley. It built fancy tech parks, provided subsidies for R&D, and even created a magnificent new … → Read More
Dan Lyons raises a provocative question in his latest Newsweek article: Is Silicon Valley still solving hard problems? After all, the “silicon” in Silicon Valley comes from its being the birthplace of the microprocessor. The magic of shrinking circuits gave rise to the computer industry, the Internet, and all of its offspring. In contrast, Lyons suggests that today’s Silicon Valley companies… → Read More
A few months ago, I wrote about why I believed that Russia’s planned “science city” was destined for failure, in my BusinessWeek column. I predicted it would follow the path of the hundreds of cluster development projects before it. Political leaders would hold press conferences to claim credit for advancing science and technology; management consultants would earn hefty fees; real-estate… → Read More
Women, Hispanics and blacks have always been underrepresented in the ranks of the Valley’s tech companies. A new analysis by the Mercury News shows that from 2000 to 2008, the proportion of women tech workers in Silicon Valley dropped from 25.3% to 23.8%, and that the national numbers dropped from 30% to 27.4%. In 2008, blacks and Hispanics constituted only 1.5% and 4.7% respectively of the… → Read More
In my last post, I discussed how the gap between the web and enterprise-computing worlds has narrowed. Some of the Valley’s developers are now building web-based systems that make old-world transaction processing seem like child’s play. After all, Twitter processes more transactions per day (in the form of messages) than the systems of many large corporations process in a month. Applications… → Read More
Most people don’t realize this, but Northern California actually has two giant technology centers: Silicon Valley and Sacramento. Silicon Valley is the world’s entrepreneurship capital and Sacramento is California’s State capital. They are less than 100 miles away from each other. But technologically, they’re light years apart. While Silicon Valley’s workers conceive the next revolution… → Read More
No one disputes that Silicon Valley is the global capital of the tech world. But this wasn’t always so. It is the Valley’s dynamism and networks which have given it an unassailable advantage. Silicon Valley has simply left rivals like Boston’s Route 128 in the dust.
I mentioned a little bit about my first Columbus Day in California in a previous column. But I didn’t tell you the whole story. I… → Read More
It’s happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare. We’re already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their US educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries. But now, xenophobia and the lack of any sensible H-1B visa policy is keeping the world’s brightest minds from coming to the U.S. in… → Read More
Good news for our brothers in the Bay. The Metro Connect consortium, which includes Cisco and IBM, got the winning bid to provide WiFi to the entire Silicon Valley. Each city in the valley needs to approve the contracts, but Metro Connect is privately owned and plan to operate through sponsorships, not through money from each city. What’s also interesting is that Internet VoIP calls will be… → Read More
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