“Some people seem to think that getting acquired should be the highest aspiration for an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. I disagree vehemently.”
Vinod Khosla recently complained that the current crop of startups in Silicon Valley seems to be obesssed with getting accquired and cashing out – which used to not be the highest aspiration. As he says in the article “You are missionaries NOT mercenaries” – precisely because missionaries are the only people that can attract the best employees – the primary challenge of any creative business.
Sometimes I dispair when reading Hacker News that this is all that the current crop care about – but I guess this is selection bias, on my and their parts.
Which ones have the vision at the moment? IMHO:
Github – organising all the worlds code.
Dropbox – organising all the worlds media.
Vicarious – helping computers think like humans.
D-Wave – harnessing quantum computing for real world applications.
Planetary Resources – gathering resources from outside our gravity well.
And no discussion of Silicon Valley would be complete without a link to Steve Blank’s comprehensive Secret History.