快猫短视频

Breakfast with Roger McNamee is an experience. He arrives at 7.30am, talking
on his mobile phone. He knows many of the other diners by name, pointing them
out and listing their achievements. He gives away advice by calling across the
room. 鈥淭ell them to increase the deal from four to six million dollars,鈥� he
calls. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 good advice,鈥� comes the reply. Other diners come over to ask his
opinion and he wanders off to dispense advice at other tables. Perhaps he鈥檒l
spot a deal in the process. It all sounds like a caricature of the way real
money men behave. But it isn鈥檛, it鈥檚 just another morning in Silicon Valley.

McNamee is a technology investor. He specialises in spotting promising
startups and funding their expansion. The potential gains are vast. Silicon
Valley is the birthplace of not just one or two of the world鈥檚 most successful
companies but dozens of them. Hewlett-Packard, Netscape, Yahoo!, Sun, Intel. . .
the list goes on. It churns out thousands of smaller companies that are
successful in their own right. Success is a way of life here.

But what is the secret to this amazing achievement? How has this area grown
from a small apricot farming community to the powerhouse of the world鈥檚
computing industry? What extraordinary mix of ingredients allows the area to
survive when other regions have curled up and died? These are questions that
have no simple answers. But the people most intimately connected with its
success鈥攖he people who create wealth, the people who generate ideas and
the people who study success鈥攈ave their own ideas. McNamee is one of
them.

鈥淪tock options play a huge part in the success,鈥� says McNamee. He is talking
about the practice of allocating shares to employees in a company so that they
become part-owners. As the value of the company increases, the value of these
shares can go through the roof. 鈥淢ake people owners and they behave differently,
they have a vested interest in success,鈥� says McNamee. And when success strikes,
stock options can pay off spectacularly. It is not uncommon to meet engineers,
accountants and even secretaries with stock options worth millions.

These people and the skills they possess are an important part of the
equation. Stanford University is often described as the academic powerhouse that
supplies Silicon Valley with the talent that makes it successful. But the truth
is far more complex. James Gibbons was dean of the school of engineering at
Stanford between 1984 and 1996 and has studied the relationship between industry
and academe. He began by looking at Stanford startups鈥攃ompanies where the
technology and the majority of the founding team came from Stanford. The list of
success stories rolls of his tongue鈥擟isco, Hewlett-Packard and Sun.

By analysing these companies and talking to the people who started them,
Gibbons has pinpointed a set of conditions that he says are necessary for a
startup to be successful. They include a product or an idea that has a large
marketplace, a high-quality team of people committed to making the company work
and a source of money. And the right infrastructure has to be in place. 鈥淭his is
where Silicon Valley is hard to replicate,鈥� he says. It has the technical
infrastructure鈥攖here is plenty of office space so that a new company
doesn鈥檛 need to build a building.

There is also an astonishing variety of high-tech companies, from chip
designers and makers to specialist software firms, that can provide anything
that a startup might need. 鈥淭his allows you to get your product to market very
quickly,鈥� says Gibbons. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 find that in many other places and speed is
very important.鈥�

Educational infrastructure is also crucial. But Gibbons is adamant that
Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley, 50 kilometres to the
north are by no means the only players. 鈥淴erox PARC is just as an effective
source of technology as Stanford. Foothill College down the road from here has
the best course in the world for semiconductor technicians. Then there is the
University of California, Santa Cruz and San Jos茅 State University. From
the outside it looks as if Stanford played a larger role than it did.鈥�

And then there is geography. 鈥淪ilicon Valley is a tightly packed place,
hemmed in by hills on one side and water on the other鈥攅veryone is
constantly tripping over each other, gossiping and swapping information and
intrigue,鈥� says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo
Park. He believes that this is an important factor in the networking culture
that drives information around the Valley.

This social architecture is critical to the valley鈥檚 success, says AnnaLee
Saxenian, associate professor of city and regional planning at Berkeley and
author of Regional Advantage, in which she compares and contrasts the
fortunes of Silicon Valley and Route 128, a high-tech industrial area near
Boston. 鈥淚n the old economy you鈥檇 meet around the water cooler. But in Silicon
Valley meeting places and networking haunts are ubiquitous.鈥� (see 鈥淎 networking
驳耻颈诲别.鈥�)

Saxenian argues that the structure of Silicon Valley is the secret to its
success. It is made up of lots of interacting specialist companies that may come
and go, while Route 128 is made up of large, independent monolithic companies.
Because of this structure, Silicon Valley survived the recessions of the early
1980s and 1990s, while Route 128 did not. Silicon Valley is unique, she says,
because it has been forced it to reinvent itself and has survived, even
prospered. 鈥淚 recently gave a lecture in Japan about my book. Afterwards one of
the audience asked 鈥淏ut who directs Silicon Valley?鈥� That鈥檚 the whole point:
nobody directs it. Silicon Valley is a self-organising system.鈥� Saffo agrees:
鈥淵ou can think of it as a rich ecology of deeply interdependent systems. What is
clear about Silicon Valley is that it is adaptable, that it can cope with
肠丑补苍驳别.鈥�

But Saxenian goes further. Not only can Silicon Valley adapt, it has become
optimised for change. Evolution, she says, is the norm rather than exception.
With chip prices falling and the global economic outlook worsening, Saxenian鈥檚
ideas could be about to receive their harshest test.

Information flows swiftly around Silicon Valley, often from caf茅 to
sports club to restaurant to . . .

From dawn to dusk and beyond, movers and shakers are meeting over breakfast,
lunch and dinner, chatting in bars and above all swapping business cards.
快猫短视频 asked a few where the best networkers hang out

Paul Saffo, director of The Institute For the Future in Menlo Park, favours
haunts such as

• Quadrus, 2400 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park +1 650 854 0880
• Gordon Biersch, 640 Emerson St, Palo Alto +1 650 323 7723
• Pete鈥檚 Harbour, No 1 Uccel Boulevard, Redwood City +1 650 365 1386
• Hobee鈥檚 Restaurant, 67 Town and Country Village, (at Embarcadero and El Camino Real), Palo Alto +1 650 327 4111

Roger McNamee, technology Investor with Integral Capital Partners goes for
places such as

• Buck鈥檚 Restaurant, 3062 Woodside Road, Woodside +1 650 851 8010
• Il Fornaio, in the Garden Court Hotel, 520 Cowper St. (at University), Palo Alto +1 650 853 3888
• The Village Pub, 2967 Woodside Road (at Hwy. 280), Woodside +1 650 8511294
• Dutch Goose, 3567 Alameda de la Pulgas, Menlo Park +1 650 854 3245

AnnaLee Saxenian, associate professor of city and regional planning at the
University of Califronia, Berkeley likes

• Wagon Wheel, 282 Middle Field Road, Mountain View +1 650 967 1244
• Ming鈥檚 of Palo Alto, 1700 Embarcadero Rd, Palo Alto +1 650 856 7700
• Decathlon Club, 3250 Central Expressway, Santa Clara +1 408 738 8743
• Churchill Club www.churchillclub.com