The question is wrong. They should have asked "Who wants to be next Steve Jobs?" I suspect not too many: most technical entrepreneurs are more interested in quickly making a "widget" of some sort and sell out to the first real business that comes along.
Some may argue that personal computers in the 70s can be compared to web-widgets of today: the public at large didn't look at them as at "real computers" and few believed in truly global adoption. In that regard early PC pioneers were swimming against the flow.
While today, the entrepreneurial mantra is to "figure out where everybody is going and be there first", being "part of the flow" is crucial (any VC will tell you that). And nobody bothers with re-thinking anything: hey, ideas are nothing, execution is the king. Build something fast. Be in a browser. Get on TechCrunch.
Next Steve won't grow out of making half-assed JavaScript reimplementations of existing desktop software. And I honestly have no idea what the Next Steve will do. I know for sure, that what we're doing today is sorta "configuration files" for software built in the 50s. Perhaps this is what they call a "matured industry" and perhaps looking for a next Steve Jobs is as practical as looking for a next Henry Ford.
Steve didn't originally intend to build computers. They were just going to sell plans for computers. So don't be too hard on present day founders. Companies tend to grow in the making.
Steve Jobs probably should not be compared to Henry Ford. Apple, if anything, is a great fast-follower with an incredible sense of design and marketing. Henry Ford, on the other hand, was mainly responsible for the initial commercialization of something that's pretty much reshaped culture. If anyone's had a similar impact in the computer industry, it's Microsoft, not Apple.
I disagree - Apple was pushing the entire idea of a Personal Computer before that market existed. Microsoft's big break was when they were called upon by IBM to provide the OS for IBM's competitor to Apple. Had not Apple taken IBM by surprise, IBM may have eventually decided to go into that market anyway. But absent competitive pressure from Apple compressing their timeline, they probably would have gone with a more proprietary design and wouldn't have even needed Microsoft.
I disagree - Apple was pushing the entire idea of a Personal Computer before that market existed.
Okay, time to channel Grandpa Simpson! Where's my cane?
<grandpa>
Now, sonny, what people forget is that Apple Computer brought their Apple II to an existing market for home PCs. [1] The first home PC had been introduced in January 1975, and by 1977 when the Apple II came out there were already multiple PC enthusiast magazines, Microsoft had been in the software business for two years, and there were multiple companies selling PC hardware. The Apple II was introduced at a personal computer show.
Even the Apple I was an entry into an existing market.
Jobs and Wozniak certainly pushed the envelope: The Apple II was, for example, arguably the first PC to be marketed at folks who didn't know how to solder, who didn't even care about hardware but just wanted to buy or write software and run it. But the hardware hackers drooled over it too [2], and they bought it, and thus the venture was less risky that you think -- it didn't have to create its own market, because Jobs knew the core market was already there; the challenge was to grow the market.
Pioneering the PC market was the work of the Altair guys at MITS, two years prior. MITS, of course, followed the usual good advice for people who are trying to discover a brand-new market: They launched early to test the market. They launched really early. As in "before they actually built more than a single prototype, they photographed a mockup and sent that photo plus the schematic to the editor of Popular Electronics [3], who read the schematic, concluded that the hardware was probably real, and published an article on it that drove hundreds and hundreds of mail orders in a few weeks." Then the company used the money from the mail orders to actually buy the parts, package the kits and send them out. [4]
You could even argue that MITS was targeting an existing market: If the folks writing Popular Electronics hadn't built a fan base that was ready and waiting to solder together computers, the PC revolution wouldn't have caught fire in 1975.
</grandpa>
All of this is cribbed from Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, a book you should really read.
[1] Note: Here "PC" has its original meaning of "generic personal computer" and does not refer to MS/DOS compatible boxen. Those came later, obviously.
[2] It helped that the Apple II not only came with schematics and a complete listing of its ROM, but had been designed by a hardware-hacking genius of the first water who liked to show off.
[3] MITS also mailed their single prototype to Popular Electronics. It got lost in the mail and was never seen again. If you find it, contact some historians.
[4] If you think you intend to follow this business plan, make sure your lawyer is sitting down before you broach the subject.
Well, okay, I will of course concede that there were personal computers before the Apple II (although at the time it came out, the Apple I was probably the closest thing to a working computer, as opposed to a kit that you could use to build a working computer, that you could get)
But Popular Electronics readers or not, I still think it's accurate to say that "the market" for PC's did not exist before Apple. The post I was replying to was arguing about whether Apple or Microsoft was more like Henry Ford. I think it's also fair to say that the market for cars in the US did not exist before the Model-T, despite the fact that there were several cars sold before it, all of which were unreliable, extraordinarily expensive, and used only by hobbyists - just like pre-Apple I (and to a lesser extent pre-Apple II) computers.
"I know for sure, that what we're doing today is sorta "configuration files" for software built in the 50s."
BINGO, i talk about this all the time and no one listens!
the move to multi-core is a chance for a real reboot, rather than optimizing old software to run slightly faster on the new hardware.
And really multi-core machines, like the Ambric MPPA (Massively Parallel Processor Array) with (currently) 336 cores on one chip, with very fast on chip communications, have the potential to change everything.
I didn't mean that to be a reference to YC. I was just pointing out that Sam was as good a candidate as anyone for "next Steve Jobs," and that he did in fact get funded by VCs-- Sequoia and NEA.
He did get funded, but is he really in it for the long run? My uninformed prediction on the matter is loopt gets acquired by MS in a few years, which does seem to be the goal of most startups these days.
I don't know Sam at all, but if all he wanted to do was sell out in a few years, I could think of better ways to pass the time than negotiating with (ick) cell phone carriers. That's some serious muck he and the other Loopts waded through, and it makes me think they're in it for the long haul.
Steve Jobs is great at making "luxury" products and marketing them. Marketing high-end products is not what China is good at. China is good at other things, like actually building the products that Jobs markets.
But, the article isn't about who will be the next Steve Jobs - it is about who is going to fund the next Steve Jobs. Given China's economic growth, there is a good chance that the next Steve jobs could be funded by investors from/in China.
You're thinking of Steve Jobs circa 2008, who makes pretty white luxury boxes.
But the Steve Jobs that counts for is Steve Jobs circa 1978, the Steve Jobs that was making cheap ugly boxes that plugged into your TV. (And of course it was really Woz, but let's leave that aside for the moment.) The point is that Apple started and became big by being a low-end company, and only turned high-end once they were already huge.
Hmm. The Apple I/II wasn't just a cheap and ugly knock-off of another product though, it was an innovative machine that changed the way computers were built. It challenged the existing notions of what a computer had to be and how much it had to cost.
The closest analogue I can think of in recent years is the Eee PC, which interestingly comes not from China but from Taiwan. (Support for the notion that innovation comes more easily in democracies? It's only one data point, but still...)
"... But the Steve Jobs that counts for is Steve Jobs circa 1978, the Steve Jobs that was making cheap ugly boxes that plugged into your TV ..."
The (production) Apples you refer to have never really been ugly nor cheap. If I remember they had sleek design with easy to get at insides so you could add slots. They always seemed to be on, around the magical $2-3K dollar mark no matter what country you lived in. Who needs monitors when you could use a spare tv? I remember getting my first PC and asking if they had a card to support TV and got blank stares... "no you need a high quality CGA screen instead or an EGA for $$$ more"
Not historically. China used to be the go-to place for fine textiles and luxury in general. There's even a saying in Spanish - "un lujo asiático" (an Asian luxury). It describes hyperbolic opulence.
"The way things are going" ... someone must be watching TV news. :)
While America is having problems in the housing and financial sectors, it still has the best environments for fostering innovation. Can you name any new industries created in China in the last 20 years?
China's main advantages are a huge (and increasingly skilled), labor force, excellent infrastructure, an eroding cost advantage, a great environment for foreign investment, and a government that can get things done. Which one of those things is critical to creating a revolutionary company? And which of them are unavailable to entrepreneurs in the US?
If I had to be on the next big industry to be created outside the US, I'd bet on India rather than China.
One huge impediment of starting up in China is the legal hurdle. YC tries to help young hackers navigate the relatively easy legal formalities in the States, but China is ten times worse. Not only does it require much more money, but it also often requires political connections. Young hackers cannot even think about doing a startup without first considering funding and finding connections.
Also, working for Microsoft or Google, you can make very very good salary (perhaps multitude more than your folks), so if you're a capable young hacker, the typical path is going corporate or study abroad for grad school.
Before we can get a Chinese Jobs, we need a Chinese PG to insulate the potential Jobses from the legal mess, provide key connections and offer validation to family and friends.
Historical bias? When China creates a new industry rather than improving and reducing the cost structure of existing industries, then I'll be a believer.
BTW, Are we talking about two different things? The article was talking about venture investment in general (which you seem to be talking about) but the title (and your original comment) was about "Who will fund the next Steve Jobs?". While I think China's rise in wealth, middle class, political influence, etc are nearly unstoppable, I doubt that the next Steve Jobs will come from there (or if he is Chinese, he will work in the US).
My interpretation of "the next Steve Jobs" is:
1) starts a many billion dollar company
2) that company creates (ie Apple and the PC) or matures (Google and search) a big, new industry
3) retains control of that company and is the global face of that company (ie Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Phil Knight, Oprah, Larry + Sergei, Buffet, Bezos, heck even Astor, Carnegie, JP Morgan, Hughes, etc)
I can't make any useful predictions about where someone like that would come from because I can't predict the new industry, but the safe bet for those criteria would still be the US.
4) success of personality and company make them widely known and recognized outside of their industry and their country
China is the next big empire and money is starting to flow more and more into China. In US, there is a credit crunch and in China, there is a dearth of companies to fund. Clearly, it's easier to fix the latter. I see China eclipsing US entrepreneurship scene in less than 10 years.
Sure, number of companies may be easy to fix with population and money, but the number of good companies is a lot harder. Just ask all the VCs with fat funds and sleepy portfolios.
They'll doubtless continue to do well - that's a good thing - but they have plenty of issues of their own to deal with, including ethnic minorities, and a big democracy deficit that will likely become more irritating to a rising middle class.
I tend to agree with this. What matters to the "rising middle class" isn't so much democracy or not, but how much individual freedom and lifestyle they can have. Once the sustenance issue is solved, people want higher ends - more personal freedom, rights, information, opportunities, expression, etc. That being said, most Chinese are still poor and historically, it's been the peasant class that has caused the most problems for governments. It'll be interesting to see how the Chinese government balances the needs of the two groups.
well its pretty simple really, China is going in overdrive towards having the largest middle class population in the world. In the article I read I think it said something like 5 years before there are more of Chinese Middle Class, than there are in United States.
So you have a very large market that continues to grow(unlike USA), of people who are willing to spend the extra money for Apple like status symbols, who are VERY nationalistic, and who have no problem buying U.S. knock offs. And since chinese have no problem copy pasting ideas/products, it would make sense that the uPod, uPhone, uNextProductFromApple will be copied, which will then fly off the shelf, and will make the chinese version of Steve Jobs rich.
But if anyone can produce knockoffs, how will any one of them grow a giant company with global reach and influence? That's what I think of when I think of Jobs. It's like the difference between being Toyota and being the company that manufactures their dashboards. You can definitely get rich owning a dashboard company, but you're not going to gain Jobs' influence and wealth.
How is "middle class" defined in that classification?
In the US, for instance, you'd need to earn at least, say, (picking a random number without wanting to start arguments and well-it-depends-where-you-live threads) $35,000 a year to be 'middle class', whereas China's per capita income is still less than $2000.
There are a lot of side effects of the burgeoning middle class, and I'm not sure it can continue at this rate unchecked. However, it's true that more and more Chinese will be able to buy nicer things.
It's a really good question. I posted something I just wrote which basically asks the exact same question from the opposite perspective, coming from the entrepreneur's viewpoint:
Some may argue that personal computers in the 70s can be compared to web-widgets of today: the public at large didn't look at them as at "real computers" and few believed in truly global adoption. In that regard early PC pioneers were swimming against the flow.
While today, the entrepreneurial mantra is to "figure out where everybody is going and be there first", being "part of the flow" is crucial (any VC will tell you that). And nobody bothers with re-thinking anything: hey, ideas are nothing, execution is the king. Build something fast. Be in a browser. Get on TechCrunch.
Next Steve won't grow out of making half-assed JavaScript reimplementations of existing desktop software. And I honestly have no idea what the Next Steve will do. I know for sure, that what we're doing today is sorta "configuration files" for software built in the 50s. Perhaps this is what they call a "matured industry" and perhaps looking for a next Steve Jobs is as practical as looking for a next Henry Ford.