1. The Valley and the Roundabout:
a tale of two Silicons
Dan Crow
CTO, Songkick
@crowquine
2. A bit about me
BSc 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
4. At least 3 valleys
San 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
5. Culture of the valley
Optimism
Risk taking
Failure
Innovation
Openness (with exceptions)
Cycle of life
6. What is a startup
New company
Built to scale fast
Almost always tech centric
7. Irrational optimism
Entrepreneurs 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
8. Mitigated risk
Risk taking is the heart of
entrepreneurship
Tech clusters offer risk mitigation
Always another startup to go to
Shared knowledge and understanding
9. Failure
You 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
10. Innovation
Advances in tech
Advances in product
Disrupting existing markets
Creating new markets
Innovation comes from smart, ambitious people
tackling hard problems
11. Openness
Knowledge sharing
explicit: meetups, hacker groups etc.
implicit: people moving between companies
Open source movement
But guarded: competition makes people wary
12. Cycle of life
Many 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
13. The valley is a mindset
The 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
15. Silicon Roundabout
London 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
16. London success
Last 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
17. Established companies
Google - 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
18. Roundabout vs Valley
Diversity Monoculture
Collaboration Competition
Mostly small companies All sizes of company
First time entrepreneurs Seasoned entrepreneurs
Evolving VC scene Mature VC scene
19. • 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
