Silicon Valley as people think of it today (tech, talent, and capital) is generally considered to have come together in the early 1970s. That doesn't mean the ingredients weren't there before -- tech had been around for decades already, and the laws allowing free movement of talent go back to the late 1800s -- but by most accounts the early 1970s are when it all clicked. Note that there's no fact of the matter to be right or wrong about here, though.
If I had to pick a point in time as the beginning, I'd probably put it at the founding of either Kleiner Perkins or Intel (a couple years after or before the Silicon Valley moniker was coined, respectively). Before then funding mostly came from other companies. With Intel you have successful founders funding their own new company, and with Kleiner Perkins you have successful founders funding other founders. To me it isn't Silicon Valley until this dynamic emerges.
Thanks for letting me know you didn't read the article, and adding nothing to what is already said within it. If you go back and read it now, you may learn some things about how history differs from what is "generally considered" as you put it. Have fun!
I've seen Steve's talk. Like all historical accounts it's just a story. It pulls some details into the foreground and pushes the rest back. Other stories arrange the details differently, for example marking Silicon Valley's beginning quite a bit earlier, with the founding of HP, a decade before the Department of Defense existed. Steve's version isn't some transcendental truth, and people aren't wrong to disagree with it or with you.
Narrative and fact are two distinct aspects of history which work together. Portraying the heavily referenced and fact-laden linked article / talk as "just story" borders on dishonesty by intentionally ignoring the facts presented - the most interesting part. Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.
> Steve's version isn't some transcendental truth
I don't see anywhere I make such a claim. "Silicon Valley" is a narrative. My point has been that the facts paint a deeper and more complex history than that narrative provides. Have a nice day!
Which ones are bugs? I read the first few sections and glanced through the rest, but it's a long notebook. There were runtime-specific implementation details, operator precedence, genuine language footguns (like scoping rules), but no bugs that I saw.
All the time, where ancient is, say, 15+ years old. I can't remember ever having an issue with it, unlike the reverse [1]. Even if there were issues, though, glibc's symbol versioning is a different beast than the Linux ABI.
I don't disagree with your broader point, but have spent enough time with enough a16z partners to say they're just people. Not outright stupid, but not extremely smart, either. And their error rate is pretty high.
Which...to some extent is by design. It's part of a VC's job to make bad bets. Sometimes the price of getting into a deal at all is getting in on insane terms, but you still do it because that one investment could return the entire fund. Maybe Thinking Machines is a winner, maybe it's another Clubhouse. We'll see.
As a hypothetical, kind of? But not really. The board is written into the company's bylaws, as a rule, and requires a board vote to change. 'Selling your board seat' really means engineering a complex deal that requires a bunch of other people to sign off.
The same is true of selling your equity, by the way. As a founder you have common shares, but early-stage investors want preferred shares with QSBS treatment. Even if you're allowed to sell your shares, which most startups don't let you do, it's not in your power to convert them to preferred or give the buyer QSBS treatment.
The problem we have in all these threads is that sometimes people just say stuff, because it sounds interesting or it's fun to fantasize about, and it's hard to tell that stuff apart from actual advice.
This person probably doesn't even have a board seat, but either way: you're not selling a board seat.
A startup that has a board is a company you can't sell a board seat at. This is past silly. Despite what you wrote earlier, "holding on to and selling" board seats is not a thing.
You're simply wrong, I have done deals like this. You are clearly quite upset about something, and are not providing a clear argument -- relying instead on personal attacks and "no true Scotsman" goal post shifting.
I have no idea who you are and there's nothing personal about any of this, but I am concerned that people are going to read this and come away with the idea that departing founders with board seats generally sell them, and when they try that, everybody is going to look at them like they're both naive and irrational --- exactly what the original poster said they were trying to avoid.
The exact details are unclear from the original post, but he definitely isn't giving up 40%. If they've only raised the pre-seed (a reasonable inference given the low valuation), then 10% ownership after 18 months points to two co-founders and a combined investor and option pool dilution of 20%. Anything is possible, of course, but unless the deal terms were very non-standard, this scenario makes the most sense.
You're right that 10% isn't necessarily a huge deal for investors, though. Early-round investor models target a specific ownership stake, and the company has to issue the same number of shares for that no matter what the composition of existing shareholders is.
The challenge with founders leaving is more psychological, like an early engineer who's vested a quarter of their 1% grant realizing that they still have to work hard for three years just to get a tenth of what the guy leaving already has. That's an easy way to suffocate the remaining team's motivation. Potential investors will (and should) look into it, but most of the time it's fine.
There's no legal 'creative stuff with options' to get around the five-year holding requirement. QSBS can be rolled over into other QSBS without restarting the clock, or you can agree to delay the actual sale (including payment) until you've met the holding requirement. At the end of the day, though, you have to hold the stock for five years, and any early payment you take (e.g. for writing options) is taxed normally.
Atlassian was bootstrapped to high eight-figure revenue and profitability before they took investor money, much like GitHub. They very much won on their own.
There's a pretty hefty literature tackling that claim, ranging from stuffy academic treatises to Nietzsche:
There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties"; for example, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, "I will"; as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as "the thing in itself," without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a contradictio in adjecto," I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!
Let the people suppose that knowledge means knowing things entirely; the philosopher must say to himself: When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, "I think," I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove; for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an "ego," and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking--that I know what thinking is, For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps "willing" or "feeling"? In short, the assertion "I think" assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further "knowledge," it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me.
In place of the "immediate certainty" in which the people may believe in the case at hand, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, truly searching questions of the intellect; to wit: "From where do I get the concept of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ego, and even of an ego as cause, and finally of an ego as the cause of thought?" Whoever ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception, like the person who says, "I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and certain"--will encounter a smile and two question marks from a philosopher nowadays. "Sir," the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, "it is improbable that you are not mistaken; but why insist on the truth?"
--
With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede--namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." It thinks; but that this "it" is precisely the famous old "ego" is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "it thinks"--even the "it" contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: "Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently--"
NB: jart is a trans woman. That doesn't make all of her opinions automatically correct, but as far as lived experience goes, she's about as informed as a person can be.
If I had to pick a point in time as the beginning, I'd probably put it at the founding of either Kleiner Perkins or Intel (a couple years after or before the Silicon Valley moniker was coined, respectively). Before then funding mostly came from other companies. With Intel you have successful founders funding their own new company, and with Kleiner Perkins you have successful founders funding other founders. To me it isn't Silicon Valley until this dynamic emerges.
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