and you worked for Siemens, and you had a great job, with credibility,
and then you gave it up to take a job at some futuristic start-up, your girl-friend would give you up. But in Silicon Valley, your
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
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So at the end of the day it seems that the best path to take is the one tha t shakes the lecherous girlfriend off of you.
But I like lecherous girls. I met my wife (in a gay bar) just as I was involved in a startup disaster and planning another one. I had no income, and she let me hide some drawings and equipment in her apartment. That was a pretty good non-gold-digger demo.
I get the feeling that wealth and status are more important to women in some countries than in the USA. Maybe women here, with their own careers, are less dependent on a man for success.
About 15% of US engineers are female. It's about 9% in the UK.
It's 33% in my company. My boss is female.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
It is slightly tongue in cheek. Not all girlfriends are that mercenary.
Where he is right is that venture capital in the amounts needed to go from four men in a shed to the next stage was nigh on impossible to find in the UK even when you had a proven track record. We ended up with US venture capital provided by angels who had a business interest in our university town and were looking out for other investments/acquisitions.
They had a rule of thumb for startups which as I recall was out of 10 plausible investments 7 will crash and burn pretty quickly, 2 will linger on an annoyingly long time and 1 will pay back for all the rest.
I am not sure what the modern figures are. Dot.com boom it looked to me like they mostly competed to have the most ludicrous possible burn rate based on half baked products that were pretty much vapourware.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
VCs can be vicious. They want a company to be splashy and trendy and go public so they can harvest the upside and bail.
They are also skilled at encouraging the founders to over-extend with the initial vc money. Then they get into trouble and need more vc money. After a few such cycles, the vc's own it all.
The rare company that grows on earnings is continuously proving that they are for real.
I have a great fun ole book, "ebrands" that encourages the get-eyeballs-at-any-cost approach. Most of the admired example companies are gone.
Some other fun books are "dot.con" "dot.bomb" and "f'cked companies"
I also have Packard's book "The HP Way" and Carly's cartoon book "The Way Forward" What a contrast.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
And if your wife works at Siemens . . . .
RL
you left out the best part, the last sentence
Of course if any of the funds investments ever make money, the EU will have to figure out how to regulate them, tax them fine them and drive them off-shore or to Luxembourg.
The trend, in the US and europe and china, is for state banks to invest in companies and in the stock market. That will not end well.
Zero interest rates, terabuck "quantitative easing" forces everyone into the stock market. If governments are in the market too, they can never return to rational interest rates, so the madness multiplies. Envision really, really giant crashes. I'm optimistic that President Harris will get the blame.
We don't have "state banks" in the US. There's no equivalent to the the agriculture bank of china here in role or authority.
They don't have real stock markets in china either, sort of like california. Commies can't allow the people to use money however they want.
Just so.
The one time I saw Princess Fiorina perform, I (and others like me) were very underwhelmed.
Then there's the early 80's book "In Search Of Excellence", which used 400 pages to state that successful companies had two-page memos. I exaggerate, of course.
The most common thing women do next to getting with you is leave; sometimes you could have prevented it and sometimes not.
I think a girlfriend who'd leave you over what particular job you take in your field (unless it was like, sex-toy engineer or something) probably wasn't worth the squeeze to begin with.
Sounds rational to me. Good taste too.
All run by politicians and economists who enjoy spinning big knobs.
Ditto.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
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Herman Hauser isn't exactly the kind of authority anybody should quote. He was part of the original Acorn team, but so was Chris Curry, who stood for the neo-Nazi National Front party in Cambridge (subsidised by Clive Sinclai r). Andy Hopper was probably the crucial member of the team, but he was pr imarily an academic.
When I lived in Cambridge I knew David Johnson-Davies, who was the original software guy, but he had enough sense to bail out about six months before the original Acorn company went bust. Hauser and Curry either didn't see th e problem coming, or didn't do anything effective to prevent it.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Heh, well does your wife know all your former paramours are still with you? Or did you have to give them all the "It's not you, it's me" routine?
"I can't be with someone if I don't respect what they do..."
A lot depends on what "the next stage" is expected to be.
I've worked for several startups that were happy to employee people and make products with which their customers were satisfied.
But, none of them were targeting consumer/mass market products.
E.g., when I was at KCP, I think we had a couple dozen KRMs in the field. Yet, that kept the front office employed, the R&D folks employed and the few manufacturing jobs intact.
It would have been folly to think we'd ever sell in "consumer" quantities; nor would most consumers want (or afford!) a washing machine sized device in their home!
Yup. Which is why they want to "own" the damn company if they're going to invest. Ideas aren't worth much.
Although they were venture capitalists and businessmen they were working with my university to help nurture silicon fen. They were good guys who made their money building aircraft simulators. We got a ride in one of the least popular models once. The demo consisted of taking off going steep to a stall flipping the plane around and landing back on the runway without the wings falling off. It wasn't clear which was worse being inside the cockpit or outside watching the thing trash around.
I have no complaints about them. 8% of a much bigger company is still better than 25% of a smaller one growing slowly. We would never have got some of our biggest customers without their backing and introductions.
They in turn were inspired by Hewlett and Packard. It was all a bit ad hoc since it was a totally new venture for everyone involved. I think we were their first partial UK investment where they didn't just buy the entire company outright. They were way more ethical than some of the high tech business "angels" about now. They did eventually sell us to a bigger US rival in California. One of our number still works there.
I have no complaints about them at all. UK VC were just not interested.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
There are a few good VCs, and a large subculture of parasites.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
None of this is comparable to a chinese state bank.
Which is not what commercial banks in the US do.
closer to the fed, but still not like a chinese state bank.
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