A beautiful time to be a Paddy on his way to the Valley
Jul 27th 2007NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
Conditions couldn’t be better for new small companies with big ideas going to the valley.
(Also see James Corbett’s more up-to-date view of SV here and all the important hotspots for Paddy’s Valley. Note: how close our hotel is to the new HQ of Facebook.)
Why?
An acceleration in online innovation and a recognition that early leaders like ebay, Google and Yahoo’s are posting dissapointing results and losing business to startups means that VCs are putting their money into Web2.0 startups like never before.
Web2.0 has become a well worn phrase over the past couple of years but this last quarter the money is following the rhetoric in earnest.
The money now says
[ ...like its news :-)...]
- That the internet is barely a decade old as a mass market phenomenon.
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- That new businesses like Google and Facebook can rise from nothing to create and dominate new markets almost overnight.
- That we are still only scratching the surface of the internet’s real potential: the ability to deal with users on personal interests and to exploit the interactive power of the medium to its full.
In fact,
- US venture capitalists are currently investing at a faster rate than they have for almost 6 years, at a level that is almost 50 per cent higher than in 1998, itself a historically active year in start-up financing.
- Risk is being discounted pretty dramatically as the time is felt to be ripe for new disruptive ideas to come through.
This is the brand of capitalism that Silicon Valley knows best. And this is why its a beautiful time to be a Paddy on his way to the valley.
3 Comments »
Shane Mc Allister on 27 Jul 2007 at 11:15 am #
Interesting map - must be old - very much the old vanguard of SV tech companies - hell, even Google isn’t on it (and Apple doesn’t appear either - must have been pre-Jobs retrun!) Wonder if it’s been updated to include the “Web 2.0″ companies - would be much more crowded if so - me thinks…Is there a Google Maps Mashup of this info?? Wouldn’t that be nice…
niall.p.larkin on 27 Jul 2007 at 11:20 am #
Would love to put something like that up . But ain’t this map a quaint and powerful reminder that things change rapidly. Too often VCs cannot imagine another Google or Facebook could possibly be in their portfolio. They need to be reminded that the future remains to be written.
James Corbett on 27 Jul 2007 at 12:55 pm #
Great to see that map again Niall. I’ve been plotting a few of the Web2.0 startups on a Google MyMap for PaddysValley - http://tinyurl.com/2a7lty
It would be great if a few more people could chip in and we could then compile them into a single KML file for viewing on Google Earth.