During speeches while President of the Cato Institute, John Allison would often say that there were “thousands of Googles” before Google. Allison's point was that the company which has come to define search technology wasn't the only Silicon Valley start-up to attain funding based on its idea for a search engine. Countless start-ups funded, countless failures, and lots of learning from those failures, led to Google.
As this column regularly points out, most Silicon Valley start-ups go belly up. Over 90 percent according to Valley eminence Andy Kessler. The previous number is more evidence that the road to Google's gargantuan valuation was paved by the decline of many companies like it that didn't make the cut.
Read Full Article »