BUSINESS
30 August 2010 Last updated at 23:01 GMT
For rapid growth and dizzying success, there's no better example than Google.
In just 12 years, Google has grown from three people in a suburban garage to a workforce of more than 20,000 in 70 offices around the world.
Craig Silverstein has been there from the start. He joined Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 to become the company's first employee.
"When we first started the company, I didn't have a title because we were very small," he remembers.
His suggestion was 'Vice President of Engineering'.
"They said, 'I think we'll leave that position open for a little while.' So we settled on Director of Technology and I've been that ever since."
Lucky
Silverstein believes that Google's founders had the right idea at the right time.
"Google was very lucky," he says.
"It started just at that time when there was a transition between being able to get around [the internet] with directories and friends' recommendations, to where you really needed to be able to search for things to find them."
And as the internet grew, so too did Google's payroll.
"We grew too big for the garage. We were six people. We had hired three more who hadn't started yet and so we needed a new space. And we spent a lot of time looking."
The office space they settled on was in the so-called 'lucky building' at 165 University Avenue - though Silverstein disagrees with this mantle.
"In the space right before us was some sort of website for learning Spanish or something like that. I've forgotten their name, but you've never heard of them. So certainly... it didn't entirely lead to blockbuster companies.
"I think what's really lucky is starting in Silicon Valley," he says.
"If you're a start-up, the support network for things like financing, legal help, for finding people who are able to do the human resources... it's so much better in Silicon Valley than most parts of the world."
"I think it's probably coincidence... that a lot of successful companies have come out of this one building, but it's not coincidence at all that a lot of successful companies have come out of this one part of the world."
wireless yogi
Start-up Stories: Mike Malone
BUSINESS
18 January 2011 Last updated at 16:49 GMT
"Great entrepreneurs are willing to die for their companies." Advice for those who want to start a business, from technology writer and Silicon Valley expert Michael S Malone.
If ever there was a reporter who could claim to really know Silicon Valley, and what makes its supremely successful entrepreneurs tick, it would have to be Mike Malone.
Mr Malone grew up in Sunnyvale, one of several small towns surrounding San Francisco Bay that are now home to some of the biggest and most successful technology companies in the world.
After working in public relations, he joined the San Jose Mercury News and became one of the first daily news reporters to cover high-technology industries as they began to flourish in northern California in the 1970s and 1980s.
He went on develop a career in journalism and broadcasting, and to be the author of many books, including "Bill and Dave", a celebrated biography of the founders of Hewlett-Packard, perhaps the archetypal Silicon Valley company.
Mike Malone also finds time to act as an advisor to new and established companies alike.
What factors does he think would-be entrepreneurs need to be most aware of?
Commitment
Many people who want to start a company underestimate the amount of time and effort involved.
According to Mr Malone "you can't say, 'well, I'm going to give it 80 percent but I want to spend more time with my family.' That doesn't work".
He recalls one entrepreneur telling him she was prepared to die for her company, if that's what it would take to make it succeed. What is needed is an almost fanatical devotion to the task of getting the company going, he says.
"You have to really believe in yourself and believe that you are in charge of your destiny, and you've got to keep moving forward".
Money
"When I go into a new start-up company and I see that they've got new desks and new chairs, and expensive computers, I immediately write that company off."
Mr Malone advises start-ups to keep a tight grip on their cash - not just because conserving cash will help them to survive longer, but also because it's a sign of the correct attitude, that the company is serious about succeeding in the longer term.
Fire yourself
Getting the right team in place is incredibly important. Do not hire your best friends just because you like them - everyone involved has to be able to deliver a good result.
"Go out and treat your team at the beginning the way you would treat the management team of your company 20 years on" advises Mike Malone.
It's also important to know when to move on. Many people who are good at starting companies are not so good at running them once they're firmly established. If that is the case, be prepared to let others with more developed management skills take over.
Ideas
The excitement that new ideas generate can often be valuable in helping to build team spirit in the early stages of creating a viable business. However, some companies have to develop many different products before they end up with one that they can actually sell.
Mr Malone cites the example of Hewlett-Packard, which tried "automatic bowling-pin setters…escalators…'intelligent' urinals…crazy crop-picking devices...They went through a whole list of ideas before they finally said, 'well you know, why don't we use Hewlett's graduate school project,' and that was the audio oscillator which they sold to Disney."
Sooner or later, product ideas have "to meet the test of the market place… companies that stick with great ideas that turn out to be impractical die."
Location
A sometimes overlooked question is the importance of where entrepreneurs should base themselves. To Mr Malone, Silicon Valley has advantages over many other places in the world. He points to the business-friendly 'eco-system' of the area, with its savvy venture capitalists ready to back the flow of ideas emerging from the campuses of Stanford and Berkeley.
But social attitudes towards business are perhaps even more important. For one thing, there's a willingness to not only accept failure, but also to embrace the learning opportunity it can present.
Another key factor is "an eternal optimism that the future is going to be better than the past. If you have a society where they always feel like the golden age was behind them, then there's no motive to keep going after that brass ring."
Other parts of the world that have tried to copy the Valley usually fail because they don't understand how interwoven the business community is with other parts of society.
"If you're going to build a Silicon Glen… or whatever you want to call it… it has to arise from the culture and the mores of the community in which it appears", says Mr Malone.
Half the battle lies in creating a climate where entrepreneurship is celebrated rather than stigmatised, and where there are business heroes to look up to. "We have our hall of fame. We tell our children stories about men and women that took gigantic risks and pulled it off."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12216759?print=true
18 January 2011 Last updated at 16:49 GMT
"Great entrepreneurs are willing to die for their companies." Advice for those who want to start a business, from technology writer and Silicon Valley expert Michael S Malone.
If ever there was a reporter who could claim to really know Silicon Valley, and what makes its supremely successful entrepreneurs tick, it would have to be Mike Malone.
Mr Malone grew up in Sunnyvale, one of several small towns surrounding San Francisco Bay that are now home to some of the biggest and most successful technology companies in the world.
After working in public relations, he joined the San Jose Mercury News and became one of the first daily news reporters to cover high-technology industries as they began to flourish in northern California in the 1970s and 1980s.
He went on develop a career in journalism and broadcasting, and to be the author of many books, including "Bill and Dave", a celebrated biography of the founders of Hewlett-Packard, perhaps the archetypal Silicon Valley company.
Mike Malone also finds time to act as an advisor to new and established companies alike.
What factors does he think would-be entrepreneurs need to be most aware of?
Commitment
Many people who want to start a company underestimate the amount of time and effort involved.
According to Mr Malone "you can't say, 'well, I'm going to give it 80 percent but I want to spend more time with my family.' That doesn't work".
He recalls one entrepreneur telling him she was prepared to die for her company, if that's what it would take to make it succeed. What is needed is an almost fanatical devotion to the task of getting the company going, he says.
"You have to really believe in yourself and believe that you are in charge of your destiny, and you've got to keep moving forward".
Money
"When I go into a new start-up company and I see that they've got new desks and new chairs, and expensive computers, I immediately write that company off."
Mr Malone advises start-ups to keep a tight grip on their cash - not just because conserving cash will help them to survive longer, but also because it's a sign of the correct attitude, that the company is serious about succeeding in the longer term.
Fire yourself
Getting the right team in place is incredibly important. Do not hire your best friends just because you like them - everyone involved has to be able to deliver a good result.
"Go out and treat your team at the beginning the way you would treat the management team of your company 20 years on" advises Mike Malone.
It's also important to know when to move on. Many people who are good at starting companies are not so good at running them once they're firmly established. If that is the case, be prepared to let others with more developed management skills take over.
Ideas
The excitement that new ideas generate can often be valuable in helping to build team spirit in the early stages of creating a viable business. However, some companies have to develop many different products before they end up with one that they can actually sell.
Mr Malone cites the example of Hewlett-Packard, which tried "automatic bowling-pin setters…escalators…'intelligent' urinals…crazy crop-picking devices...They went through a whole list of ideas before they finally said, 'well you know, why don't we use Hewlett's graduate school project,' and that was the audio oscillator which they sold to Disney."
Sooner or later, product ideas have "to meet the test of the market place… companies that stick with great ideas that turn out to be impractical die."
Location
A sometimes overlooked question is the importance of where entrepreneurs should base themselves. To Mr Malone, Silicon Valley has advantages over many other places in the world. He points to the business-friendly 'eco-system' of the area, with its savvy venture capitalists ready to back the flow of ideas emerging from the campuses of Stanford and Berkeley.
But social attitudes towards business are perhaps even more important. For one thing, there's a willingness to not only accept failure, but also to embrace the learning opportunity it can present.
Another key factor is "an eternal optimism that the future is going to be better than the past. If you have a society where they always feel like the golden age was behind them, then there's no motive to keep going after that brass ring."
Other parts of the world that have tried to copy the Valley usually fail because they don't understand how interwoven the business community is with other parts of society.
"If you're going to build a Silicon Glen… or whatever you want to call it… it has to arise from the culture and the mores of the community in which it appears", says Mr Malone.
Half the battle lies in creating a climate where entrepreneurship is celebrated rather than stigmatised, and where there are business heroes to look up to. "We have our hall of fame. We tell our children stories about men and women that took gigantic risks and pulled it off."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12216759?print=true
Is there a genius in all of us? from bbc
13 January 2011 Last updated at 01:36 GMT
Those who think geniuses are born and not made may be wrong, says writer David Shenk.
Where do athletic and artistic abilities come from? With phrases like "gifted musician", "natural athlete" and "innate intelligence", we have long assumed that talent is a genetic thing some of us have and others don't.
But new science suggests the source of abilities is much more interesting and improvisational. It turns out that everything we are is a developmental process and this includes what we get from our genes.
A century ago, geneticists saw genes as robot actors always uttering the same lines in exactly the same way, and much of the public is still stuck with this old idea. In recent years, though, scientists have seen a dramatic upgrade in their understanding of heredity.
They now know that genes interact with their surroundings, getting turned on and off all the time. In effect, the same genes have different effects depending on who they are talking to.
Malleable
"There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment," says Michael Meaney, a professor at McGill University in Canada.
Continue reading the main story “Start Quote
It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or become anything. But the new science tells us that it's equally foolish to think that mediocrity is built into most of us”
End Quote David Shenk
"And there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome. [A trait] emerges only from the interaction of gene and environment."
This means that everything about us - our personalities, our intelligence, our abilities - are actually determined by the lives we lead. The very notion of "innate" no longer holds together.
"In each case the individual animal starts its life with the capacity to develop in a number of distinctly different ways," says Patrick Bateson, a biologist at Cambridge University.
"The individual animal starts its life with the capacity to develop in a number of distinctly different ways. Like a jukebox, the individual has the potential to play a number of different developmental tunes. The particular developmental tune it does play is selected by [the environment] in which the individual is growing up."
Is it that genes don't matter? Of course not. We're all different and have different theoretical potentials from one another. There was never any chance of me being Cristiano Ronaldo. Only tiny Cristiano Ronaldo had a chance of being the Cristiano Ronaldo we know now.
But we also have to understand that he could have turned out to be quite a different person, with different abilities. His future football magnificence was not carved in genetic stone.
Doomed
This new developmental paradigm is a big idea to swallow, considering how much effort has gone into persuading us that each of us inherit a fixed amount of intelligence, and that most of us are doomed to be mediocre.
Continue reading the main story
How a London cabbie's brain grows
London cabbies famously navigate one of the most complex cities in the world.
In 1999, neurologist Eleanor Maguire conducted MRI scans on their brains and compared them with the brain scans of others.
In contrast with non-cabbies, experienced taxi drivers had a greatly enlarged posterior hippocampus - that part of the brain that specialises in recalling spatial representations.
What's more, the size of cabbies' hippocampi correlated directly with each driver's experience: the longer the driving career, the larger the posterior hippocampus.
That showed that spatial tasks were actively changing cabbies' brains. This was perfectly consistent with studies of violinists, Braille readers, meditation practitioners, and recovering stroke victims.
Our brains adapt in response to the demands we put on them.
The notion of a fixed IQ has been with us for almost a century. Yet the original inventor of the IQ test, Alfred Binet, had quite the opposite opinion, and the science turns out to favor Binet.
"Intelligence represents a set of competencies in development," said Robert Sternberg from Tufts University in the US, in 2005 after many decades of study.
Talent researchers Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Kevin Rathunde and Samuel Whalen agree.
"High academic achievers are not necessarily born 'smarter' than others," they write in their book Talented Teenagers. "But work harder and develop more self-discipline."
James Flynn of the University of Otago in New Zealand has documented how IQ scores themselves have steadily risen over the century - which, after careful analysis, he ascribes to increased cultural sophistication. In other words, we've all gotten smarter as our culture has sharpened us.
Most profoundly, Carol Dweck from Stanford University in the US, has demonstrated that students who understand intelligence is malleable rather than fixed are much more intellectually ambitious and successful.
The same dynamic applies to talent. This explains why today's top runners, swimmers, bicyclists, chess players, violinists and on and on, are so much more skilful than in previous generations.
All of these abilities are dependent on a slow, incremental process which various micro-cultures have figured out how to improve. Until recently, the nature of this improvement was merely intuitive and all but invisible to scientists and other observers.
Soft and sculptable
But in recent years, a whole new field of "expertise studies", led by Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson, has emerged which is cleverly documenting the sources and methods of such tiny, incremental improvements.
Born to be a footballer?
Bit by bit, they're gathering a better and better understanding of how different attitudes, teaching styles and precise types of practice and exercise push people along very different pathways.
Does your child have the potential to develop into a world-class athlete, a virtuoso musician, or a brilliant Nobel-winning scientist?
It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or become anything. But the new science tells us that it's equally foolish to think that mediocrity is built into most of us, or that any of us can know our true limits before we've applied enormous resources and invested vast amounts of time.
Our abilities are not set in genetic stone. They are soft and sculptable, far into adulthood. With humility, with hope, and with extraordinary determination, greatness is something to which any kid - of any age - can aspire.
David Shenk is the author of The Genius in All of Us.
Those who think geniuses are born and not made may be wrong, says writer David Shenk.
Where do athletic and artistic abilities come from? With phrases like "gifted musician", "natural athlete" and "innate intelligence", we have long assumed that talent is a genetic thing some of us have and others don't.
But new science suggests the source of abilities is much more interesting and improvisational. It turns out that everything we are is a developmental process and this includes what we get from our genes.
A century ago, geneticists saw genes as robot actors always uttering the same lines in exactly the same way, and much of the public is still stuck with this old idea. In recent years, though, scientists have seen a dramatic upgrade in their understanding of heredity.
They now know that genes interact with their surroundings, getting turned on and off all the time. In effect, the same genes have different effects depending on who they are talking to.
Malleable
"There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment," says Michael Meaney, a professor at McGill University in Canada.
Continue reading the main story “Start Quote
It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or become anything. But the new science tells us that it's equally foolish to think that mediocrity is built into most of us”
End Quote David Shenk
"And there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome. [A trait] emerges only from the interaction of gene and environment."
This means that everything about us - our personalities, our intelligence, our abilities - are actually determined by the lives we lead. The very notion of "innate" no longer holds together.
"In each case the individual animal starts its life with the capacity to develop in a number of distinctly different ways," says Patrick Bateson, a biologist at Cambridge University.
"The individual animal starts its life with the capacity to develop in a number of distinctly different ways. Like a jukebox, the individual has the potential to play a number of different developmental tunes. The particular developmental tune it does play is selected by [the environment] in which the individual is growing up."
Is it that genes don't matter? Of course not. We're all different and have different theoretical potentials from one another. There was never any chance of me being Cristiano Ronaldo. Only tiny Cristiano Ronaldo had a chance of being the Cristiano Ronaldo we know now.
But we also have to understand that he could have turned out to be quite a different person, with different abilities. His future football magnificence was not carved in genetic stone.
Doomed
This new developmental paradigm is a big idea to swallow, considering how much effort has gone into persuading us that each of us inherit a fixed amount of intelligence, and that most of us are doomed to be mediocre.
Continue reading the main story
How a London cabbie's brain grows
London cabbies famously navigate one of the most complex cities in the world.
In 1999, neurologist Eleanor Maguire conducted MRI scans on their brains and compared them with the brain scans of others.
In contrast with non-cabbies, experienced taxi drivers had a greatly enlarged posterior hippocampus - that part of the brain that specialises in recalling spatial representations.
What's more, the size of cabbies' hippocampi correlated directly with each driver's experience: the longer the driving career, the larger the posterior hippocampus.
That showed that spatial tasks were actively changing cabbies' brains. This was perfectly consistent with studies of violinists, Braille readers, meditation practitioners, and recovering stroke victims.
Our brains adapt in response to the demands we put on them.
The notion of a fixed IQ has been with us for almost a century. Yet the original inventor of the IQ test, Alfred Binet, had quite the opposite opinion, and the science turns out to favor Binet.
"Intelligence represents a set of competencies in development," said Robert Sternberg from Tufts University in the US, in 2005 after many decades of study.
Talent researchers Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Kevin Rathunde and Samuel Whalen agree.
"High academic achievers are not necessarily born 'smarter' than others," they write in their book Talented Teenagers. "But work harder and develop more self-discipline."
James Flynn of the University of Otago in New Zealand has documented how IQ scores themselves have steadily risen over the century - which, after careful analysis, he ascribes to increased cultural sophistication. In other words, we've all gotten smarter as our culture has sharpened us.
Most profoundly, Carol Dweck from Stanford University in the US, has demonstrated that students who understand intelligence is malleable rather than fixed are much more intellectually ambitious and successful.
The same dynamic applies to talent. This explains why today's top runners, swimmers, bicyclists, chess players, violinists and on and on, are so much more skilful than in previous generations.
All of these abilities are dependent on a slow, incremental process which various micro-cultures have figured out how to improve. Until recently, the nature of this improvement was merely intuitive and all but invisible to scientists and other observers.
Soft and sculptable
But in recent years, a whole new field of "expertise studies", led by Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson, has emerged which is cleverly documenting the sources and methods of such tiny, incremental improvements.
Born to be a footballer?
Bit by bit, they're gathering a better and better understanding of how different attitudes, teaching styles and precise types of practice and exercise push people along very different pathways.
Does your child have the potential to develop into a world-class athlete, a virtuoso musician, or a brilliant Nobel-winning scientist?
It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or become anything. But the new science tells us that it's equally foolish to think that mediocrity is built into most of us, or that any of us can know our true limits before we've applied enormous resources and invested vast amounts of time.
Our abilities are not set in genetic stone. They are soft and sculptable, far into adulthood. With humility, with hope, and with extraordinary determination, greatness is something to which any kid - of any age - can aspire.
David Shenk is the author of The Genius in All of Us.
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