Silicon Valley’s best talk Facebook, Tesla and how to build successful startups
Winner of annual competition will take home $1 million
SAN FRANCISCO >> In most tech conferences, the former CEOs of LinkedIn, Siri and Cisco and two of the most influential venture capitalists in Silicon Valley would have been the headline speaker all on their own.
But at the Startup World Cup grand finale event in San Francisco on Friday, they made up only the first half of a day full of speakers discussing how to build a successful startup.
The Startup World Cup is a global competition led by San Jose-based venture capital firm Fenox Venture Capital. After preliminary rounds in 28 locations around the world, with winners of each round convening in San Francisco, the startups will compete in a finale, where the winner will take the $1 million prize.
Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures and founder of Sun Microsystems, advocated the old adages of entrepreneurship, such as sticking with one’s vision and not paying too much attention to experts and big company CEOs.
“Thirty years of experience means 30 years of biases,” said Khosla. “Entrepreneurs ignore those rules. No large innovation in the last 30 years has come from a big existing company.”
Khosla also keyed in on pertinent issues happening in Silicon Valley, such as Facebook’s scandal following the Cambridge Analytica revelations. Khosla partly blamed the media for escalating the gravity of the issue, adding that “muddying the ill intent of Cambridge Analytica and the Russians with the honest mistakes Facebook made shouldn’t have happened.”
“When you reinvent Wall Street Journal & Dow Jones Venture Capital reporter Cat Zakrzewski, left, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, right, pose for photos with Anis Uzzaman, chairman of Startup World Cup, after speaking during the conference and pitch competition.
an area, you are going to make mistakes,” said Khosla. What’s the ethics of the entrepreneur and the company? The good ones go fix the mistakes. I thought Mark (Zuckerberg) did a good job to fix it and admit mea culpa.”
Khosla also added his opinion on recent Tesla crashes in Florida and Los Gatos, the latter of which involved a car ramming into a Starbucks.
“Driverless cars are going to kill some people, but will they save more lives?” said Khosla. “Unless there is a net saving of lives saved, they should not be allowed on the road. I don’t know if every Tesla
accident should be a headline in the evening news. That’s where it becomes clickbait.”
Other speakers spoke freely about current issues. Former LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman weighed in on Donald Trump’s presidency, calling it a disaster. Ron Conway, the angel investor and an influential political playmaker in San Francisco, chimed in on the San Francisco mayoral elections, asking attendees who live in the city to vote for former interim mayor London Breed.
Conway also recalled how his company Altos Computers in the late 1980s ultimately failed. He preached how decisiveness is the most important trait in a CEO and that “procrastination was the devil” in helping a company grow.
“If you don’t disrupt yourself, you will be disrupted,” said Conway. “We disrupted for 10 years and then we got disrupted.”
Hoffman, who sold LinkedIn in 2016, spoke of his concept of “blitzscaling,” or the ability to quick build users, revenue and
the company itself in light of the growing competition across all industries. Hoffman and venture capitalist Chris Yeh elaborated on the concept in a book titled “Blitzscaling” set to publish in October.
“Silicon Valley is a little confused with itself right now because it has too many interesting possiblities,” said Hoffman. “The world is heading more toward blitzscaling. Competition is coming from many, many places nowadays.”
Unlike Khosla and Conway, former Cisco CEO John Chambers ambled around the stage and interacted with the seated attendees. He asked for entrepreneurs to keep their focus on markets that are in transition and ripe for disruption.
To demonstrate fearlessness and openness of mind, Chambers shared a bag of roasted crickets with speakers.
“I’m encouraging you to dream,” said Chambers as he munched on crickets.
“Silicon Valley is a little confused with itself right now because it has too many interesting possiblities.” — Former LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman