dlhý, výborný článok plný infa aj o tom, ako sa zmenilo SF, konkrétne ekonomika, konkrétnejšie životný štýl mladých produktívnych ľudí, teda ako by asi mohol vyzerať model úspešného človeka zajtrajška? si v technológiách, máš rozbehnutých veľa vecí, investuješ do startupov v seed-phase, a nežiješ len pre prácu, reflektuješ aktívnych a uvažujúcich ľudí okolo seba nielen ako zdroje príjmov, ale užívaš si, žiješ so subkultúrou, si creative a mindful, flexibilný, niečo ako nezamestnanosť nie je problém, si akoby na voľnej nohe, keď sa nezadarí, pokojne môžeš skúsiť opäť; práca sa nedá dobre oddeliť od voľného času, tak ako sa nedá umenie oddeliť od reklamy
aj o tom, ako sa zmenilo venuture capital podnikanie
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/14/131014fa_fact_heller?currentPage=all
In recent years, San Francisco has become the capital of what someone described to me as “three-business-card life.” People might give a lot of their time to one startup while keeping a substantial equity share, and maybe a nominal job title, in one or two others that are just getting off the ground. They might help fund-raise for one company while investing in another one. Entrepreneurialism is a high-failure business, the thinking goes, but if you keep a few pots on the burner sooner or later something will boil. Then you can live off that payoff for a while or invest it in other things. People like Willis, young and urban and professionally diffuse, tend to regard success in terms of autonomy—designing your life as you want—rather than Napoleonic domination.
“The ecosystem used to funnel lots of talented people into a few clear winners,” he told me that morning. “Now it’s funnelling lots of talented people into lots of experiments.” Why be Gordon Gekko when you could make enough to have a nice place and go paleo on local greens—and then take a day or two off to cycle out to Stinson Beach? Isn’t that freedom more distinguishing than cash or a C.E.O. title, which everybody in your field has access to? San Francisco’s young entrepreneurs appear less concerned about flaunting their earnings than about showing that they can act imaginatively, with conspicuously noble ethics.
“The word ‘entrepreneur’ has undergone a redefinition,” Ben Casnocha told me over lunch one day at LinkedIn’s Mountain View campus, down the road from Google. “For a while, it was like you’re either running the laundromat or the coffee shop, or you’re trying to create the next Apple. But there’s been a whole flourishing of people who are starting different kinds of businesses—who are having pride in a small business that gives them autonomy.” I’ve known Casnocha since, literally, his infancy: we grew up a few blocks away from each other, in San Francisco’s Cole Valley, and our families were friendly through a babysitting co-op. (That such a co-op existed perfectly distills the area’s mood and demographics in those years.) I lost track of him until a few years ago, when we started following each other on Twitter.
Casnocha is now twenty-five, and although it is difficult to say what his job is, it is easy to see that he does it well. He writes books about the entrepreneurial life style. He sits on the board of Comcate, a company he founded as a teen-ager to help local governments streamline their complaint responses, among other things. He runs a speaking series and a salon. And he is “chief of staff” to Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn.
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“Traditionally, it was the man in the gray flannel suit,” Roy Bahat, who currently heads the Bloomberg Beta startup-investment fund, told me. “We inflict pain on you, and we give you something in exchange. We call it ‘compensation.’ ” Now money comes through channels more akin to fellowships than punch cards. Partly, this is a function of tech’s tight networking and famous tolerance for failure. If your company goes belly up, as most do, you can simply start another or, in desperate times, join a friend’s: debt and other demons hold less power in the house of funded startups. The working calendar has changed as a result.
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ako a prečo zlacneli startupy a čo to prináša
The same systems that make outsourcing of small tasks more efficient have driven down the cost of launching a company. Once, an entrepreneur would go to a venture capitalist for an initial five-million-dollar funding round—money that was necessary for hardware costs, software costs, marketing, distribution, customer service, sales, and so on. Now there are online alternatives. “In 2005, the whole thing exploded,” Ravikant told me. “Hardware? No, now you just put it on Amazon or Rackspace. Software? It’s all open-source. Distribution? It’s the App Store, it’s Facebook. Customer service? It’s Twitter—just respond to your best customers on Twitter and get satisfaction. Sales and marketing? It’s Google AdWords, AdSense. So the cost to build and launch a product went from five million”—his marker skidded across the whiteboard—“to one million”—more arrows—“to five hundred thousand”—he made a circle—“and it’s now to fifty thousand.” As a result, the number of companies skyrocketed, and so did the number of angels: suddenly, you didn’t need to be a venture-capital firm to afford early equity.
All this scaling down, Ravikant thinks, has encouraged new, more rewarding life styles. “I have this guy who’s driven me around in Sidecar a bunch of times,” he said. “He lives in Tiburon. He golfs every day at noon in Palo Alto. On his route from Tiburon to Palo Alto, he stops in San Francisco. He hits a button, turns on his Sidecar, picks his rides, does five or six, rejects two, meets new people, chats them up, and then he continues driving to Palo Alto, having picked up his golfing money for the day.” Ravikant envisages a future in which everybody is a private contractor, snatching jobs out of the ether, working for one another as they please—a future much like today’s San Francisco.
