The mutual fund industry provided the money for Intel and Motorola and Hewlett-Packard to crush the competitors.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We got bigger, much scarier competitors. We ended up with Microsoft, a company with all the money in the world, the way I look at those guys. And IBM, another company that, historically, dwarfed us.
An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.
Most firms are hierarchical in nature, with everyone getting different slices of the economic pie. The problem is those slices are negotiated every time a firm raises a new fund, so in between funds, which is most of the time, the partners are trying to outgun one another to make a stronger case for themselves.
But if you look at WorldCom, which is the biggest failure to date, they grew dramatically, they were buying companies that were bigger than they were and they were doing it off inflated stock.
Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.
It used to be that the only ones with access to cutting-edge technology were top government labs, big companies and the ultra-rich. It was simply too expensive for the rest of us to afford.
Google Ventures has a direct financial incentive to ensure the companies we invest in succeed.
Big companies often use their leverage to take stakes in would-be suppliers, especially in the technology business.
Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.
And then lo and behold IBM, Apple and Motorola took an ad in all the newspapers, double page ad, and said, announcing the chip that they were now able to manufacture it and that they were going to kill Intel.