The flotation of social network Facebook in May at a valuation of more than $100bn was notable in many ways, including identifying the shift in the centre of economic gravity from the east to the west coast of the US.
This shift has global ramifications as the venture ecosystem in northern California around the nebulous area of Silicon Valley is creating global disruption.
This disruption is based in part on the money that flows round the world from venture capitalists based in the valley. But also, and more importantly, the idea of how private capital can be used to fund fast-growing, often disruptive products and services from entrepreneurs spread by ambitious, motivated people with allegiance to their network of peers rather than social or professional organisations.
Facebook’s symbolism
Founded by students at east coast-based Harvard University using the school’s equipment and information, Facebook’s rise in less than a decade to a stock market capitalisation of more than $100bn at its initial public offering has been a sore point for the Massachusetts region.
Harvard and the state had little economic benefit from the social network’s initial public offering – at the time it had no university venturing fund to provide seed capital to its students and even its large endowment fund that backs venture capital firms as a limited partner (investor) in their funds decided against committing – re-upping in the jargon – to Accel XI, which owned a large chunk of Facebook.
Conversely, for northern California, the brain drain of Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, and his company from east to west coast crystallises the success of the vision of local leaders around Stanford University in Palo Alto – the so-called heart of Silicon Valley in the state.
As Stephen Adams in his paper, Regionalism in Stanford’s Contribution to the Rise of Silicon Valley, said: “From the early years of Stanford University, the university’s leaders saw its mission as service to the west [the 11 states nearest to the Pacific ocean] and shaped the school accordingly.
“At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the west at the hands of eastern interests fuelled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient indigenous local industry [from the 1930s].”
But while Facebook’s move east to west to be closer to the valley is perhaps the most striking example of the power and influence of the “indigenous local industry” built around microprocessors and electronics, its draw as an innovation ecosystem has global reach.
A global valley
A long list of corporations, including Sweden-based truck maker Volvo this month, have set up corporate venturing groups in Silicon Valley to join more than 100 peers from local and international companies just within the information and communications technology sector, according to data from Global Corporate Venturing.
This collection of corporate ventur-ing units is by far the most densely-packed collection on the planet and overshadows the 96 members of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists, which includes a handful of corporate venturing units on its members page as well as primarily independent venture capital firms(VCs).
And, whereas the overall number of active VCs is shrinking to fewer than 200 in the whole of the US, according to some insiders, the corporate venturing community in the valley and the US is growing.
Recent entrants to the valley’s corporate venturing community include Spain-based phone operator Telefónica, UK-based media group BBC and online communications provider Skype, which hired Stephen Lee from South Korea-based consumer electronics maker Samsung’s Californian corporate venturing office in June to head its new ventures group.
US-listed software provider Microsoft, which bought Skype last year for $8.5bn, has also set up a specificcorporate venturing fund for its search engine, Bing.
This Bing Fund follows local technology peers Intel, which operates a host of specific funds managed by its internal Intel Capital team, and Apple, which effectively outsourced the management of the iFund to VC Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
News provider New York Times, in an article, Multinationals stake a claim in venture capital, last month captured the global focus of executive attention on the valley even from a host of non-technology companies, such as coffee retailer Starbucks which invested in payments service provider Square.
It said: “New York, London and Hong Kong are common addresses for blue-chip multinationals. Now Silicon Valley is, too.”
The new entrants are attracted in part by the US’s dominant economic position as the world’s largest economy but to the valley as a specific destina-tion because of its success in backing ideas and technologies that have either created new industries or disrupted existing ones, including Genentech in biotechnology, Netscape as an internet browser, Google in search or Facebook in social networks.
Heidi Mason, another émigré from the east coast and co-founder of consultancy firm Bell Mason Group, said: “Silicon Valley is one of a handful of truly catalytic global hubs for innovation commercialisation and has a distinctive stamp.”
Valley culture
This “distinctive stamp” is the combination of collaboration and competition between people in the area where personal ties formed within the valley entrepreneurial ecosystem seem to override most other forms of association.
Adams describes the origins of “the powerful sense of regional solidarity that accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley” that meant even competitors would collaborate with or help peers.
Locally, this is known as the “pay-forward” principle, where recipients of a good deed or gift help out others rather than the original benefactor.
This solidarity was, at least in part, formed out of economic necessity, as by 1943 the top 100 companies, mainly based on the east coast, were responsible for 70% of goods produced, with the western states seen as regions supplying raw materials to be shipped east for manufacturing.
Companies collaborated through the West Coast Electronics Manufacturers Association (WCEMA), co-founded by David Packard, one half of the progenitors to computer maker Hewlett-Packard (HP).
The association’s aim was for members to attain their own progress through the region’s progress. A process of collaboration for mutual benefit was aided by the fact the electronics industry has had little vertical integration and plenty of labour mobility.
This reliance on suppliers and dominance of a niche through a more technically advanced system than a peer’s can provide monopolistic-type profits while the advantage lasts and fear of usurpation by another system – both of which encourages people to look for the “next big thing”.
The labour mobility, in turn, encourages loyalty to the personal network rather than firm– whether in engineering, law or venture capital – to help find the next big thing and then reward those who have been helpful.
Labour mobility due to few legal restrictions is also aided by California’s history as a relatively open place for immigration, including students to the state’s universities who have been able to stay and work, and with an appetite for taking risks.
Academic Vivek Wadhwa and colleagues said in 2007 that there was at least one immigrant key founder in 25.3% of all engineering and technology companies established in the US between 1995 and 2005 inclusive. He added: “We estimate that together, this pool of immigrant-founded companies was responsible for generating more than $52bn in 2005 sales and creating just under 450,000 jobs as of 2005.”
In his latest book, The Immigrant Exodus: why America is losing the global race to capture entrepreneurial talent, out this month, Wadhwa says: “The issue is not simply the threat of reverse brain drain [from the US to their home countries] but a newly identified and historically unprecedented halt in high-growth, immigrant-founded start-ups.”
Or, as Tim Draper, managing director of VC Draper Fisher Jurvetson, put it in a review for the book: “The venture capital business in Silicon Valley has been all about immigrants since my dad funded David Lee at Qume.
“For Draper Fisher Jurvetson, immigrants have been the tomato in the BLT. Sabeer Bhatia, an immigrant from India started Hotmail. Elon Musk, an immigrant from South Africa started Tesla and SpaceX, and Samir Arora, an immigrant from India, started Glam Media. Our domestic business would be significantlyless valuable without immigrants.”
This cooperative network model in Silicon Valley, where opportunity has been open to talented, hard-working people and where trust is important, is almost unique in financial services, at least until the opportunity becomes too big, as symbolised by the litigation surrounding Facebook and the controversy over firms clawing back early employees’ shares.
The relatively high degree of economic opportunities and threats and importance of personal ties has allowed a large amount of leeway to develop in local social norms about behaviour to stakeholders outside of the ecosystem.
Executives at corporations combine personal angel investing at varying degrees of arm’s length from their companies’ corporate venturing units.
And stories abound of companies buying up struggling portfolio companies at high valuations to help the venture capital fund they invest in personally to make their money back or in order to attract someone connected with the entrepreneur to their business.
The lack of regulatory crackdown has been aided by opacity in the private capital markets and the relative success of some insiders in not only making themselves rich but also creating new businesses.
Most of the personal connections have coalesced round the state’s main research institutions and universities, including Berkeley and University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) but especially Stanford.
Stanford’s importance
Many of the original members of the WCEMA association were small and from northern and southern California but a number formed around pioneering collaborations between industry and academia at Stanford.
As the New York Times wrote in 2009: “The technological powerhouse that displaced Santa Clara County’s fruit orchards grew in part from the vision of Frederick Terman, the dean of engineering at Stanford, who as early as the 1930s sought to create an industry so his students would not have to leave the valley for electronics firms in the east.”
While Terman later failed in his ambition to set up a peer to Silicon Valley in New Jersey around Princeton University and the local pharmaceutical, chemicals and telecoms companies, Stanford met the needs of its local community and prepared its undergraduates for the real world rather than an ivory tower, as envisaged by its founder, Leland Stanford, who was a railroad magnate.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Terman encouraged faculty and graduates to start their own companies and is credited with nurturing Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates and other high-tech firms.
What would become Silicon Valley – a term coined by a journalist in the 1970s – grew up around the Stanford campus over 50 years.
But the academic-business relations needed a third influnce – money – and the form in which it was originally delivered most effectively was VCs.
One such firm is Asset Management Company, whose 25th anniversary poster of west coast venture capital, 1958 to 1983 – a copy (pictured) kindly given to the author by legendary founder Franklin “Pitch” Johnson – says: “Venture capital on the west coast of the United States has no exact age. Entrepreneurs and investors have been vital forces in the development of the region since pioneer days.
“With the formation of the first modern venture capital firms in 1958, however, the basic foundations of today’s venture structure were laid, even though several individuals antedated those early firms in activity.
“Over 300 people in over 100 companies have built west coast venture capital in these 25 years.”
And with close ties to the local universities, many have given back to academia that was the source of many of their deals through their time, money and deals.
In his office off Route 101 and appropriately near a baseball diamond, Johnson said: “There has been a partnership between university and enterprise and, as a side issue, a tradition of graduates contributing back to university, such as Bill Gates and Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, not just money but going back to teach.”
Johnson was also head of the venture capital investments made by a pioneering fund set up to support Stanford’s Athletics school, and had run the quarter-mile for the university.
His father, Pitch Sr, was Stanford’s director of track and field. Pitch Jr was founding chairman of the venture capital committee of the DAPER (Department of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation) Investment Fund set up in 1982 by 33 initial investors under the leadership of alumnus Frank Lodato.
He said: “VC firms provided $20,000 of deals and, because they were Stanford guys, these were home runs, for example [computer network equipment supplier] Cisco going from $4m to $90m.
“We put good deals in to keep the department going. Engineering set up a similar fund a few years later. The main thing was all the venture firms were in.
“There was a collegial spirit to keep athletics strong, not just by giving money but giving deals – the sort of 10 to 20-times-return deals, not those you just wipe your face with. It paid for half the new stadium.
“Stanford had a major role from its pioneering dean and encouraging enterprise and students and its industrial park near Stanford for local companies.
“There is also the crossover between schools, especially in technology between business and engineering.”
Johnson was one of those encouraging the ties and introducing those with business ideas to venture capital.
He was one of the founding members of the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund and was a lecturer in management for 12 years at the graduate school of business, where he developed and taught the firstventure capital course.
The model has been copied by other universities in the state, including by angel investor and venture capitalist Ron Conway, who founded the UCLA VC Fund, and Berkeley, which is understood to be setting up a student-run venture fund.
Economic impact
The venture capital model has been dispersed following its impact on fast-growing companies.
California’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 1.97% in 2011 to $1.7 trillion, following contraction in 2008 and 2009, and led by a 3.8% increase in electronics manufacturing.
Information and technical services – computer system design – was up 6.2% during the year.
Overall, computer and electronic products made up 5.9% of state output in 2010, up from 0.6% in 1997 – an inflation-adjusted 1,300% growth rate in the period.
Information and data processing – media and internet sectors – grew by 547% in the same 1997-2010 period.
As a result, California – whose largest industry remains the government sector – added 147,700 jobs during the first six months, the strongest half-year growth since the second half of 2005, according to the state’s Employment Development Department.
And the state has been increasingly successful at negotiating the corridors of power to win government money to support its entrepreneurs and basic and applied research at local universities and institutes.
Up until 1943, at the height of World War II, Stanford and the western states had either avoided state funding or struggled to win contracts, but the Manhattan project developing the atom bomb and importance of electronics during the Cold War after 1945 provided resources to the local industry.
With the ending of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, public funding of research has fallen as a proportion of GDP, while private research and develop-ment (R&D) has increased.
In New Atlantis’s summer issue on the sources and uses of US science funding, the news provider found California easily invested more than any other in the US – about four times the next nearest states by amount of R&D in 2008.
Of the $81.3bn of R&D spent in 2008 in California, the latest figures available to the author Joseph Kennedy, nearly a quarter came from federal sources and the remainder from the private sector.
But federal money is aimed especially at areas of potentially large economic significance.
Matthew Nordan, a partner at oil baron Rockefeller’s VC Venrock, in a blog analysing ARPA-E grants – the US government agency launched in 2009 to fund high-risk, high-reward energy research – found only two states claimed a double-digit percentage of prime contractors: California and Massachusetts with 22% and 13% respectively.
Nordan said: “This should shock nobody, as these two states are home to the country’s two biggest technology clusters.”
He added: “I wanted to see if any states were over- or underrepresented, so I compared the percentage of ARPA-E grants won in each state with the percentage of science and engineering PhDs granted there, using data from the NSF [National Science Foundation].
“States with a greater share of ARPA-E grants than PhDs can be considered overrepresented in the programme and vice versa. Of the top five grant winners, California and Massachusetts are greatly overrepresented, by 54% and 109%, respectively.”
ARPA-E has announced $516m awarded to 183 projects across 12 programmes during four funding events, according to Norden.
The programme is well-regarded, and the US Budget for 2012 proposed a further $550m for ARPA-E out of a $147.9bn total bill.
But the fact that so many multinational companies are setting up an innovation base in Silicon Valley is expected to reinforce the amount of R&D spent in the state by complementing local firms and federal investment.
News provider Wall Street Journal said the amount of US R&D spending by domestic affiliates of foreign companies, led by those based in the UK, rose steadily over a decade to $40.5bn in 2008.
New imperialism
From a region that felt exploited by the east coast only half a century earlier, Silicon Valley has become an imperial centre exporting its model for other countries to follow and in return importing raw material of talent and tributes.
The training of venture capitalists in other countries, either from working for valley-based venture firms, such as Intel, Cisco, Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins, or from studying at Stanford, means senior figures in countries as culturally diverse as the UK, Russia and China all talk the same language as US-based venture investors even if the application reflects local requirements.
And valley-based firms,such as Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, have been expanding internationally as the top 20 VCs continue to grow.
Limited partners in venture funds have calculated that while there is persistence in returns – both for good and bad firms– there is also a vintage year and sector factor driving performance.
Effectively, what this means is that almost any information technology deal struck in 1984 delivered excellent returns and Silicon Valley was at the epicentre of the entrepreneurial wave.
The valley’s skill has been to translate this initial success into helping create repeated waves of innovation affecting more industries.
In the Wall Street Journal’s 2012 list of 50 best venture-backed start-ups, 37 are based in California, including eight of the top 10.
And Silicon Valley Bank said it tracked about 600 start-ups launching in San Francisco alone in the first nine months of the year – while the City’s chief innovation officer has an interactive map of the 800 start-ups currently present in the conurbation – click here.
While the heyday of the venture industry and its phenomenal growth in assets under management and economic impact came in the quarter-century to 2008, there has been little let-up to demand for skilled venture investors with the most important qualification– being part of the valley ecosystem.
In 1962, some of the industry’s original venture investors, such as Pitch Johnson, began meeting in San Francisco’s Olympic Club to share ideas and deals and eventually become the first official non-profit venture capital organisation in the world – the Western Association of Venture Capitalists.
Fifty years on, and the new wave of venture investors have started meeting with similar informality and have just created the Corporate Venture Forum with roots in the valley but an international focus and membership.
Corporate venturing, therefore, has become increasingly complementary to the original VCs in the valley as they have evolved and often narrowed their focus or diversified across stages and borders.
But as Terman said: “Industrial activity that depends on imported brains and second-hand ideas cannot hope to be more than a vassal that pays tribute to its overlords, and is permanently condemned to an inferior competitive position.”
The question Silicon Valley has started to ask is which countries or organisations are threatening to disrupt its own hegemony of the ideas underpinning venture capital and innovation, or whether they can be co-opted to work within its existing ecosystem and rules.