From The Washington Post
Innovation and the brotherhood of the Valley
By Emi Kolawole
Touring Silicon Valley and meeting with the area’s leaders, you see almost immediately that there is an hierarchy similar to a university class structure or a fraternity. There are the fraternity presidents or upperclassmen — established companies that have achieved both financial success and critical acclaim. In the middle are the junior and sophomore treasurers and secretaries — companies that are recovering from an initial spurt of funding and press attention, wondering how best to capitalize on their new-found fame. And then there are the freshmen pledges — start-ups that are struggling through the rigorous hazing period with or without the guidance of an emerging upperclassman via seed money, angel investment or free advice.
We spoke with University of California Berkeley’s School of Information Dean AnnaLee Saxenian, who shed some light on the culture of Silicon Valley as it relates to innovation.
“There tend to be cohorts in the Valley, people grow up together,” Saxenian said. “So you’re start-ups at the same time. So, there's a sense of your cohort.” And, in the cohort structure, not all companies participate in the same way. “Cisco is giant,” said Saxenian, “but it probably isn’t as tied-in to this.”
“I think you just see these informal communities,”Saxenian said, citing the Fairchildren — the first wave of spin-off companies created by the founding members of Fairchild Semiconductors — as the foundation for today’s Silicon Valley cohort structure. “There are these genealogies in books about where they went, the companies they started. And they have meetings of the grandchildren and the great grandchildren....