Silicon Valley's future remains bright say executives at Adobe and Cisco (middle) and venture capitalists from IVP (left) and Trinity Ventures (right). Self-serving?
Regardless of the recession, the high cost of living, heavy traffic and the unemployment, Silicon Valley will remain the world’s center of innovation.
A self-serving prediction made during a panel made of executives from Adobe and Cisco and venture capitalists at Institutional Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures at the AlwaysOn Summit in Stanford today.
“For the last 30 years, every single year there has been talk about the death of Silicon Valley: nothing new is happening, real estate is too expensive, the freeways are too crowded. I just discount all of that and we’re going to continue to do great,” said Norm Fogelsong, general partner at Institutional Venture Partners.
The late stage investor pointed to the “entire ecosystem” of innovation and investment to support that and “once you get to a point where we are right now the system feeds on itself and everybody wants to be an entrepreneur and do great things.”
“The father of Silicon Valley is Fred Terman and the unique vision that he had as the dean of engineering [at Stanford] is that business and academia should work together and not separately; and that you’re going to get better research, better products quicker… That was revolutionary at the time. Harvard didn’t feel that way, nor MIT or Berkeley…,” added Fogelsong.
A bit less enthused was Dan Scheinman, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Media Solutions Group.
“I’m optimistic too although a bit nervous on the short term because of the impact of… a liquidity crisis… but in the long run the magic of Silicon Valley is been disruption. This ecosystem is here,” said
Finally, much more pessimistic is venture capitalist Fred Wang, general partner at Trinity Ventures.
“The venture capital numbers for Q1 and Q2 of this year have been down pretty dramatically compared to last year. I think a lot of people are waiting for it to bounce back… but actually these numbers are the new norm. venture capital is going to go through a very painful adjustment cycle, rightsize itself… to $15-20 billion a year which is half or a third of what it’s been.”
As a result the companies that venture capital will fund will have to be more capital efficient, so “things like cleantech or some the very large system builds will be harder to accomplish,” and innovation will be more incremental than revolutionary.
Here’s a video excerpt of the panel’s conversation on the future of Silicon Valley:
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