Chapters 14,19 and 22 Summaries

       For the assignment I had to read chapters 14,19 and 22 in the History of Silicon Valley book, each chapter outlined and went into detail about different topics and explanations within Silicon Valley. Starting with chapter 14, which talks about Lawyers and Investment Bankers, and what their jobs were and how important their parts were in Silicon Valley. They both had a major role due to the fact that they helped companies become successful and helped maintain there success through rough periods in the valley as well. In Silicon Valley if a company fails and does not get off the ground, it is not necessarily viewed as a failure but more like a learning experience and the valley encourages people to try to build a new startup company again even if one failed. One example of a legal counsel is Wilson Sonsani Goodrich & Rosati, In 2012 they were legal counsel to "more than 300 public and private companies, representing firms such as Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, VA Linux Systems, Novell, Netscape Communications, and Micron Technology." This shows how successful some Lawyers and Legal Counsel in Silicon can be. One example of taking an investment and making a large sum of money is, a typical investment into Google years ago was 25,000 to 50,000 dollars and the return on those investments were close to 25 million.


       In Chapter 19 of the History of Silicon Valley, it talks about the failures of products and companies in Silicon Valley, and some of the reasons why they failed. In the reading it talks about how some failures came pretty early on in the companies and they never got off the ground or had a chance to make it in the Valley. Some products had a good idea and a good start but struggled with production problems or even marketing problems and then never recovered. Some products simply came before there time and had to many problems due to technology not being advanced enough to handle the product. One example of an early failure of a product was Apple's Newton Personal Digital Assistant, this product resembled a product we have today and that is a tablet but it was a little different. This product had problems from the start due to the engineers of the product putting too many features into it such as a hardrive and LCD screen, this caused the device to run slow and also some of the features did not work correctly which discouraged potential buyers from the product.

 
       In Chapter 22 of the History of Silicon Valley, it talks about start up companies and how they survived in the early stages in the valley and then became successful later on. Silicon Valley is not like many other places, it has a more relaxed atmosphere but at the same time it influences risk taking and the idea of failing is not bad but at times almost encouraged and looked at in a positive light. One thing I was very surprised about was the amount of electronic companies that started up in Silicon Valley and ended up failing, they were all different types too such as a company that makes processors for computers to a company that develops memory in the computers and software.