Procrastination ensured that I am only now recording my thoughts about ”The Cult of the Amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture” but better late than never and coincidentally topical given one of the themes for  this year’s ‘Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford’ – Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction. ‘Cult of the Amateur’ is a punchy 2007 book by journalistic commentator, Andrew Keen;  it essentially represented the first bucket of cold water enthusiastically poured over the euphoria which once engulfed the world of on line social media and social networking (the recession represented the second bucket of ice cold water!)

The book was a welcome antidote to the fevered hype surrounding the very Silicon Valley invention – user generated content, it challenged the democratisation of the on line media platforms which had spurred the crowds to storm the palace gates. It criticized the unwashed masses – the ‘amateur’ musicians, journalists, literary authors and film makers, globally broadcasting their work using web technologies (to swamp the internet.)

‘…when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule?’

Also explored is the web’s creative destruction of the advertising models supporting newspapers and magazines;  lamenting the deceleration of the newspaper industry, Keen blames Craigslist and quotes Adam Smith. Regarding, the digital piracy-led annihilation of the music industry, Keen’s polemic or rant (depending on your perspective…) means that he forgets the giant steps of the 20th century’s music industry - the cultural revolutions of jazz, blues, soul, rock, heavy metal, punk, hip hop, house, techno - genres which challenged the middle-of-the-road anti-innovation record label bosses:

‘Say good-bye to today’s experts and cultural gatekeepers – our reporters, news anchors, editors, music companies, and Hollywood movie studios.’

Andrew rightly criticizes the unadulterated praise heaped on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ concept famously epitomised by Wikipedia, and in a later 2008 discussion at the Oxford Internet Institute he interestingly suggests that universities act as gatekeepers for on line encyclopaedic resources.

You are probably wondering about the relevance of this 2007 book in 2010 and here goes:

- Today, the AOL acquired-Bebo once the healthy posterchild of the UK web 2.0 landscape, optimistically purchased for $850M/£550 with post tax profits of £2.6M, is now due for a sell-off or closure after startling yoy financial losses of £1M and declines in traffic

-  The News International acquired-Myspace is struggling against the tide. Its original CEO and founder duo are no longer with Myspace and the subsequently appointed CEO has moved on…meanwhile another Rupert Murdoch-owned  media vehicle, Timesonline.com announced the introduction of paywalls for June 2010.

- Friends Reunited was subsequently sold for £25M after being purchased for £175M

- And Facebook is regularly embroiled in news stories around societal breakdown and crime

The good news is that the professional social network, LinkedIn is doing better than ever in the face of a job market downturn

The bad news is the overall absence of innovative and commercially workable business models beyond subscription paywalls for on line social media and social networks.

And, the newspaper and music industries are still in a state of flux – cheering thoughts.

www.siliconvalleyoxford.com

Key Theme: 10 Years

Reflecting on the last 10 years, and looking forwards to the next 10 years of innovations in technology, business models, investing and the business environment, Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford 2010 shall explore the disruptive technologies and business innovations of the past 10 years, reflecting on the demise of old industries, old economic models and old perspectives.

Sub-theme 1: Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction

The advancement of the Internet is arguably the greatest computer science innovation. Its overwhelmingly pervasive power has led to the disruption of established knowledge and cultural industries, sectors which represent the core of our very existence in terms of recording, reporting, reflecting and questioning our society and its culture.

Sub-theme 2: Could Silicon Valley exist anywhere in the world?

The tenth anniversary provides an opportunity to ask whether Silicon Valley could evolve into a generic term or metaphor for an entrepreneurial cluster anywhere in the world. What is the secret of Silicon Valley? Why has Europe never managed to create an equivalent (note that Oxfordshire is recognised as one of the most successful entrepreneurial ecosystems in Europe.) At SVCO 08, investor, Saul Klein questioned whether the richness of European history, its architecture and long established institutions present an impediment. Contrast with Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv. How does national culture, history, geography and policies impact or fuel the formation of entrepreneurial clusters? Is the next Silicon Valley likely to be in Shanghai or the already burgeoning Hyderabad or Bangalore?

After our museum tour, Mike Malone arranged for us trekkers to meet up with Ramu Sunkara, CEO and co-founder of Qik. Malone describes Qik as “the next Twitter” and he’s not alone as bloggers and tech journalists everywhere know that the Qik’s live mobile video streaming service is taking off around the globe. I also dig the fact that Ramu is an ex-Oracle employee since I too spent several years working for a software giant (SAP). The experience one acquires from working at a leading software company can often provide a more well-rounded business acumen which is something that certainly comes in handy when launching your own venture. As for the Qik service, I have yet to get it working on my Blackberry but will update my Qik channel as soon as it is.

Our final stop of the day was to see LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. <insert more LinkedIn content here>

<insert final thoughts here>

“I distinguish between having an MBA and being an MBA. Never be an MBA.”  – Joe DiNucci

After breakfast, we headed to the world’s hottest startup on earth – Twitter.  When we arrived at their office, we were greeted by founder Biz Stone (@Biz) and many others from the Twitter family including Oxford MBA alumni Santosh Jayaram (@santojay) who now runs Twitter’s operations.  It was interesting to hear Biz explain how Twitter was born but what really caught my attention was their strong focus on value creation through its real-time search.  For most entrepreneurs, I think the passion for creating value is simply part of their DNA.  However, when your product is experiencing phenomenal growth rates and non-stop media coverage like Twitter, it’s morally excellent to see the entrepreneurs still incredibly focused on value creation rather than cashing in their $250M+ chips to the Google’s of the world. 

When I first signed up for a Twitter account last year, I didn’t really “get it”.  Fortunately a few experienced Twitter users gave me some pointers which really helped.  I also downloaded a few third party Twitter apps like TweetDeck which greatly increase my usage.  However, the most valuable thing I find about Twitter is not how minimalist communication tools promote creativity (although that’s cool too) but rather how Twitter’s ecosystem is actually changing lives for the better.  And If Twitter turns out to be just another fad?  Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.            

Follow me on Twitter @nancyvega.

p.s. I was tempted to run my start-up idea through YouNoodle’s predictor but decided against.  For now, ignorance is bliss.     

After YouNoodle, we headed over to Y Combinator to meet up with Paul Graham.  The Y Combinator model is unique in that entrepreneurs are not required to submit a business plan in order to apply for funding.  In fact, what’s great about Y Combinator’s model is that not only do they provide seed money to help the founders get started, they also provide mentorship thereby serving as a “one-stop shop” incubator for entrepreneurs.  And let’s face it, if you have the chance to learn from someone like Paul who’s already ‘been there, done that (and did it well)’, then giving up 2-10% equity in your startup is actually a pretty good deal.  And of course Paul’s 1-hour mentorship session to us trekkers was equally valuable in that he reminded us about the importance of team dynamics – especially when it comes to selecting your co-founder(s).   It’s funny how sometimes the most obvious lessons are the ones we need reminding of the most.

The entire SVCO event however goes by faster than the speed of light.  The following day I kept thinking to myself, “That’s it?  It’s over already?”  If you’re a passionate, budding entrepreneur like me, the answer is no.  Less than a week after the SVCO dust had settled, Jon (my co-chair) and I were already exchanging emails titled ‘Oxford Comes to Silicon Valley’.  

After five long months of planning a trek in-between (and often times during) academic lectures and assignments, here we are in Silicon Valley getting ready to meet with some of the most successful and interesting entrepreneurs on this planet.  Just three words come to mind… BRING IT ON.        

Closing Session: The Universe, the Brain and Second Life

Elon Musk, CEO founder of Space X; Baroness Susan Greenfield, Oxford Professor of Neuroscience and Director of The Royal Institution; Philip Rosedale Chairman and Founder of Second Life

Baroness Susan Greenfield, Oxford neuroscience professor, provocatively challenged and explored received wisdoms around Web 2.0 and virtual worlds in a lively panel exchange with Philip Rosedale (Founder and Chairman of Linden Lab, Second Life.) Rosedale’s face lit up when the audience posed wonderfully visionary questions around the virtual modelling of sub-conscious worlds and human-implanted silicon chips (could enable instant parallel immersions in real and virtual worlds.) A series of quiet groans and astonished laughter from the tech innovation crowd was the reaction to the rather eccentric audience questions on Shamanism and correlations between obesity and virtual world involvement!

From the ‘universal’ platform of the School’s Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, South African, Elon Musk spoke about his stratospheric venture to propel domestic flights to Mars…Space X. Only in America, I say, and only the Silicon Valley ‘can do’ culture could produce an IT entrepreneur with inter-planetary ambitions…

Although audience-panel interactions tackled the ethics of virtual worlds, the ethics of space travel investment in the face of debilitating earthly diseases and painful economic disparities between the Northern and Southern hemispheres were left untouched and unexplored…(admittedly it has been suggested that space research could provide answers to environmental challenges.)

The Chairman for this panel discussion, Ian Goldin (21st Century School Director and former Vice President, World Bank) praised the Second Life economy: I wondered how it would fare in the current recessionary climate. Rosedale’s target is another one billion Second Life residents: I wondered about the enthusiastic take up of social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn relative to the more tentative ‘virtual world’ domain – a topic to be explored in 2009 by another Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford star, Oxonian and CEO founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, perhaps…Regardless, Secondlife is truly ‘HG Wellian’ or ‘Aldous Huxleyan’ in its achievements.

A signal that the closing session had succeeded in its visionary and forward looking ambitions is that the ‘R’ word, ‘Recession’ wasn’t mentioned…no, not even once!

http://www.siliconvalleyoxford.com/media/webcast

Lunchtime panel discussion:

Saul Klein (Index Ventures Partner, Seedcamp Founder and former Skype Marketing Vice President) championed European entrepreneurs as better placed than Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to face the new world order. Interestingly, Chris Sacca (investor and former Head of Special Initiatives, Google) lamented the immigration barriers of the Bush era – a series of barriers disincentivising highly skilled tech teams in their attempts to relocate to the US and Silicon Valley. Sacca’s thoughts about the ‘European brain drain’ would be of enormous interest…?

One of the most powerful woman entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Pat House saw ‘positive’ in terms of the recession. With a new entrepreneurial venture under wraps and upbeat advice for overcoming or undermining the recession, she seems set to repeat the success of Siebel – sold to Oracle.

In contrast to Ms House’s optimistic message, Andrew Keen, author of ‘Cult of the Amateur: how the Internet is killing our culture’ predicted a recessionary climate of 10 years: ironic, provocative or intentionally controversial…the quantitative basis for this fatalistic prediction remains unclear. Worryingly, the neverending avalanche of gloomy financial news gives 10 years a subjective accuracy.

Oxford Union debate: “This house believes that the problems of tomorrow are bigger than the entrepreneurs of today”

http://www.siliconvalleyoxford.com/media/webcast

Will Hutton (leading Economics commentator) usurped the established arguments maintaining the incompatibility of government activities with entrepreneurship by attributing the success of American (and thereby Silicon Valley) entrepreneurship to the irreplaceable role of government in creating, developing, evolving or enforcing intellectual property laws, R&D investment, universities and schools, and transport infrastructure…the bedrocks of technological innovation. Arguments which happen to resonate with the 44th American President, Barack Obama:

“The Audacity of Hope: It should come as no surprise, then, that we have a tendancy to take our free-market system as a given, to assume that it flows naturally from the laws of supply and demand and Adam Smith’s invisible hand. And from this assumption, it’s not much of a leap to assume that any government intrusion into the magical workings of the market – whether through taxation, regulation, lawsuits, tariffs, labor protections, or spending on entitlements necessarily undermines private enterprise and inhibits economic growth…And although the benefits of our free market system have mostly derived from individual efforts of generations of men and women pursuing their own vision of happiness, in each and every period of great economic upheaval and transition we’ve depended on government action to open up opportunity, encourage competition and make the market work better. In broad outline, government action has taken three forms. ..build infrastructure, train the workforce, and otherwise lay the foundations necessary for economic growth…

…The Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the interstate highway system, the Internet, the Human Genome Project – time and again, government investment has helped pave the way for an explosion of private economic activity. And the creation of a system of public schools and institutions of higher education…government has helped provide individuals the tools to adapt and innovate in a climate of constant technological change…

Aside from making needed investments that private enterprise can’t or won’t make on its own, an active government has also been indispensable in dealing with market failures.”

Capturing the spirit of our times, Dr Ian Goldin, Director of the 21st Century School and former World Bank Vice President highlighted the limitations of the markets in solving world problems…global challenges which transcend the ‘profit’ motive. Finally, Dr Angela Wilkinson, ‘Scenario Planning and Futures Research’ academic expert based at the Said Business School met applause with a series of elegant arguments around the limitations of technological determinism and an attribution of the problems of climate change to motorcar entrepreneur, Mr Ford!

In opposition, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, stressed the pivotal contribution of entrepreneurial organisational structures to the efficient address of ‘problems of tomorrow’ and Reid Hoffman scored a home run with his smart linguistic analysis of the motion.

The motion ‘This house believes that the problems of tomorrow are bigger than the entrepreneurs of today’ was narrowly beaten by 20 votes (111: 91) by the Silicon Valley super team of Reid Hoffman, CEO founder of LinkedIn; Julie Meyer CEO founder of Ariadne Capital; Jerry Sanders, Founding Partner of San Francisco Science and Biz Stone, Co-founder of Twitter.

& beyond

Could Silicon Valley evolve from a geographical classification to a descriptive term for any high performing technologically innovative region? In 2009 we have our sights set on further dialogue with the Indian, Chinese and European entrepreneurial clusters in complement with Oxford’s network of accomplished and quite brilliant Silicon Valley innovators.