k1 - dan crow (cto songkick)
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Silicon Valley Comes to Imperial 2012TRANSCRIPT
The Valley and the Roundabout:a tale of two Silicons
Dan CrowCTO, Songkick@crowquine
A bit about meBSc Comp. Sci. PhD in Artificial Intelligence
Art of Memory - early UK startup
Apple for 4 years
4 valley startups: Verb, Qbiquity, Guru/Unicru, Blurb
Co-founder and CTO, Blurb
5 years at Google NY and London
Now: CTO, Songkick
The valley
At least 3 valleysSan Jose - hardware
Intel, Applied Materials, AMD, National Semi
Mountain View/Palo Alto - VCs, large companies
Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Mozilla, LinkedIn, eBay
San Francisco - consumer startups
Twitter, Foursquare, Dropbox, Kickstarter, Yelp
Culture of the valleyOptimism
Risk taking
Failure
Innovation
Openness (with exceptions)
Cycle of life
What is a startupNew company
Built to scale fast
Almost always tech centric
Irrational optimismEntrepreneurs are optimists
Ignore the naysayers
Believe you can change the world
Believe everyone wants what you create
Believe, even in the face of contrary evidence
Mitigated riskRisk taking is the heart of
entrepreneurship
Tech clusters offer risk mitigation
Always another startup to go to
Shared knowledge and understanding
FailureYou learn more from failure than
success
The great ones pick themselves up and try again
Failure is not stigmatized
Fail fast
Fail forward to success
InnovationAdvances in tech
Advances in product
Disrupting existing markets
Creating new markets
Innovation comes from smart, ambitious people tackling hard problems
OpennessKnowledge sharing
explicit: meetups, hacker groups etc.
implicit: people moving between companies
Open source movement
But guarded: competition makes people wary
Cycle of lifeMany large companies in the valley (Google, Cisco, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Adobe...)
Constant stream of people starting new companies
Universities (Stanford, Berkeley) generate startups
Huge influx of talented workers from across the globe
The valley is a mindsetThe valley reinvents itself every decade or so:
60s hardware; 70s/80s micros; 90s web; 00s social
It’s a way of thinking about the future, then creating it
It’s about experimenting, failing, trying again
Get the best and the brightest together, solve problems
The Roundabout
Silicon RoundaboutLondon is the center of a new UK startup movement
Started around 2007 with 10 companies
Now between 500 and 1500 companies
Thousands of people employed
Exclusively Internet software tech
London successLast FM - $240M acquisition by CBS
Mind Candy - over 60M users
Tweetdeck - acquired by Twitter
Wonga - over $100M in revenues
Shazam - over 100M users
Songkick - over 6M users
Established companiesGoogle - over 750 employees in London
Twitter - first non-US eng office
Facebook - first non-US eng office
Microsoft - Bing and Xbox engineering
Skype - HQ in London
Amazon - new engineering centre
Roundabout vs ValleyDiversity
Collaboration
Mostly small companies
First time entrepreneurs
Evolving VC scene
Monoculture
Competition
All sizes of company
Seasoned entrepreneurs
Mature VC scene
• Tell us who your favorite artists are and we’ll tell you when they come to your town to play live
• Transforming live music with Detour
• One of the original Silicon Roundabout startups
• 30 people, 6M monthly uniques
• We’re hiring! songkick.com/jobs