Автор работы: Пользователь скрыл имя, 22 Ноября 2010 в 13:18, реферат
Introduction
Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple Bayesian spam filter that inspired most current filters. He's currently working on a new programming language called Arc.
Paul Graham has an interesting article about reasons why there are so many startups in US. The list includes items such as allowing immigration, being a rich country, not being (yet) a police state, good universities, freedom to fire people, and so on.
Startups are largely an American phenomenon. Why? What is it about America that makes startups work there? Could Silicon Valley be replicated in another country?
These valid points that differentiate USA.
The US has (ten) significant advantages:
The US allows immigration
The US is not a poor country
The US is not yet a police state
American universities are better
You can fire people
In America work is less identified with employment
America is not too fussy
America has a huge domestic market
America has venture capital
America has dynamic typing for careers
SAINT-PETERSBURG STATE UNIVERSUTY
OF ECONOMICS
AND FINANCES
English Language
Department № 1
Brief Summery
«Why Startups
Condense in America»
articles by:
Paul Graham
« Why Startups
Condense in America »
Summarized by Ann Zinovieva
Group 453
Assessed by
Vlasov N.M.
Saint Petersburg
2007
Table of content
Introduction
Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple Bayesian spam filter that inspired most current filters. He's currently working on a new programming language called Arc.
Paul Graham has an interesting article about reasons why there are so many startups in US. The list includes items such as allowing immigration, being a rich country, not being (yet) a police state, good universities, freedom to fire people, and so on.
Startups are largely an American phenomenon. Why? What is it about America that makes startups work there? Could Silicon Valley be replicated in another country?
These valid points that differentiate USA.
The US has (ten) significant advantages:
Why startups condense in America.
Paul Graham’s point is that America has a combination of circumstances which is unique, and which helps startups form. While his assertions are debateable, the do provide a good framework for discussion.
The author asks us: Could you recreate Silicon Valley elsewhere? With the right 10,000 people, yes. It used to be that geography was important, but now it's having the right people. You need two kinds of people to create a start-up: rich people and nerds. Towns become start-up hubs when there are rich people and nerds. There are two situations: one the city could not be a start-up hub because there are lots of rich people but no nerds. Result: no start-ups; another city has the opposite problem - lots of nerds, no rich people. You need rich people, because they tend to have experience and connections, and the fact that it's their money makes them really pay attention.
Start-ups are people, not the buildings. Creating business parks doesn't help start-ups, because start-ups do not use that kind of space. If you can get rich people and nerds together, you can recreate Silicon Valley.
Smart people like smart people and will go where they are. But it’s necessary to have a place where investors want to live and students want to live when they graduation. It needs to be a major air travel hub so people can travel easy.
To attract the young, you need a city with a live centre. Young people do not want to live in suburbs.
The US has some significant advantages:
1. Allows immigration. Would be impossible to reproduce Silicon Valley in Japan, because most of the people there speak with accents and the Japanese don't allow immigration. It has to be a Mecca, and you can't have a Mecca if you don't let people in.
2. Won't work in a poor company. India might one day produce a Silicon Valley, because it has the right people but it's still very poor. US has never been as poor as some countries are now, so we have no data to say how you get from poor to Silicon Valley. There may be a 'speed limit' to the evolution of an economy.
3. The US is not (yet) a police state. China might want to create a Silicon Valley, but their tradition of an autocratic central government goes back a long way. Gets you efficiency but not imagination. Can build things, but not sure it can design things. Hard to have new ideas about tech without having new ideas about politics, and many new tech ideas do have political implications so if you squash dissent you squash new ideas. Singapore suffers a similar problem.
4. Need really good universities and their US have those. Outside of the US, people think of Cambridge in the UK, then pause. The best professors seem to be all spread out, instead of concentrated, so that hinders them because they don't have good colleagues, and their institutions don't act as a Mecca.
Germany used to have the best universities, until the 30s. If you took all the Jews out of any university in the US, there'd be a huge hole, so as there are few Jews in Germany, perhaps that would be a lost cause.
5. You can fire people. One of the biggest obstacles are the rigid labor laws in Europe, which is bad for start-ups because they have the least ability to deal with the beurocracy. Start-ups need to be able to fire people because they need to be flexible. EU public opinion will tolerate people being fired in industries where they care about performance, but that seems limited to football.
6. Work is less identified by employment in the US. EU has the attitude that the employer should protect the employee. In the US, most people still think they need to get a job, but the less you identify work with employment the easier it is to start your own company.
7. America is not too fussy. If there are any laws regarding businesses, you can assume that start-ups will break them because they don't know them and don't care. They get run out of places that they shouldn't be run out of, like garages or apartments. Try that in Switzerland and you'd likely get reported. To get start-ups you need the just right amount of regulation.
8. US has a huge domestic market. Start-ups usually begin by selling locally, which works because there is a huge domestic market. In Sweden, for example, the market is smaller. The EU was created to form an international market, but everyone still speaks different languages. But it seems as if everyone educated person in Europe now speaks English, if present trends continue, more will.
9. Funding. Start-up funding doesn't only come from VCs, but also from business angels. Google might not have got where they were without angel funding of $100k. All you need to do to get that process started is to get a few start-ups going, but the cycle is slow. It takes five years for a successful start-up to produce a potential angel investors. You need angels as well as VCs.
10. America has a more relaxed attitude to careers. In the EU, the idea is that everyone has a specific occupation, but in the US things are more haphazard. That's a good thing. A start-up founder is not the type of career a high-school kid will choose - they choose conservatively. Start-ups are not things you plan, so you are more likely to get them in a society that allows career changes on the fly.
America’s schools might be a benefit - they are so bad, that people wait til college before they make their decisions about what their career will be.
This list is not meant to suggest America is the best place for start-ups. It should be possible not to duplicate, but improve on Silicon Valley. What’s wrong with Silicon Valley?
- It's too
far away from San Francisco. You either live in the Valley, or commute
from SF. Would be better if the Valley was actually interesting, but
it's the worst sort of strip development.
- Bad public transportation. There's a train, which is not so bad by
American standards but by Eu standards, its' awful. So design a town
for trains, bikes and walking and cars last, but it'll be a long time
before the US does that.
- Have lower capital gains taxes. Low income tax isn't so much of an issue, but capital gains is. Lowering the tax instantly increases returns on stocks, as opposed to real estate, so to encourage start-ups, have low cap gains. But decreases in cap gains disproportionately favour the rich. Belgium as cap gains of 0.
- Smarter immigration policy. People running Silicon Valley are aware of the shortcomings of the US immigration system, and since 2001 it has become very paranoid. What fraction of the smart people who want to come to the Valley want to actually do get in? Half? The US policy keeps out most smart people and puts the majority in crap jobs. A country which got immigration right could become a Mecca for smart people simply by letting them in.
So basic recipe for a start-up hub is a great university and a nice town. You could improve on Silicon Valley easily. Just let people in.
Conclusion
In this article lots of interesting thoughts, but it’s difficult to agree with all of them.
On one hand Paul was not entirely clueless about Europe, e.g. he knew that in the Netherlands all universities are pretty much equal in quality (although there are some differences, none of them is really standing out, only in specific fields). But on the other hand it was all so much from an American view, he mentioned the social aspect of the story, and all the other aspects where America and American culture differs so much from Europe.
For example, we really don’t agree with author that ‘equal’ universities are bad. It’s actually pretty convenient because you don’t have to go live across the country just to get into a good university, and if you go to one that’s close you can still be fairly sure that the education isn’t bad.
We also not convinced that to create a good place for startups, things like being less ‘fussy’ about social security and making firing of people easy are a requisite, why it wouldn’t be possible without.
Most startups start as a very small group of people who have a plan, and are willing to invest free time in the hopes that it will become profitable. When they arrive at a point that they can actually hire people, they apparently earn sufficient money for that or have good prospects. If they after that suddenly get to a point where they can’t pay their own employees anymore, then clearly the idea is not profitable, and the startup fails.
We don’t see why governments aren’t trusted with financial decisions. Clever investment decision-makers with good knowledge of the field and experience can’t/don’t work for the government?
And English becoming the main language? A fantasy. Fortunately! Diversity in languages should be treasured, not seen as an inconvenient obstacle.
By the way, why are startups such a good thing? Not that we disagree, but the author hasn’t convincing arguments that they are the key to innovation
Many
people say that USA is a dream land, land of opportunities. There is
also a term "American dream" and we don't know that any other
country is associated with dream in that manner. Many people that started
their startups failed. In USA thousand startups fail every day but some
of them become very successful.
Glossary
Literature