Читать книгу The New Builders - Seth Levine - Страница 18

By the 1950s, the United States was in the middle of the Cold War and on a mission to beat the USSR. That effort meant that a firehose of government funding landed on new and crucial innovations developed around Stanford University and the defense‐related businesses located nearby. Research and development (R&D) made up 10 percent of the entire US federal budget for the first half of the 1960s, with the US federal government spending more on R&D than the rest of the world combined.¹³

Over the next few years, the pace of innovation in Silicon Valley meant that investors who poured dollars into the new companies alongside the government were making money at an enviable rate. This was also true for the other technology hotbed at the time, the area surrounding Boston known as the “Route 128 corridor” because of the cluster of technology businesses that set up in the office parks just off the highway. The technology companies spawned during this time by a scientific establishment that was overwhelmingly White and male were small businesses, too – but they were a new breed of small business, with access to endlessly deep pockets, an insatiable appetite for growth, and a new way of delivering returns to investors.

Ronald Reagan, who owed his rise to power to his ability to draw support from libertarians and freedom‐loving evangelicals, was well aware of what was going on in the Valley and how he might use it to his political advantage.^v He declared the 1980s the “decade of the entrepreneur.” In 1988, speaking to a crowd of 600 computer scientists in Russia, he said that freedom of thought and information enabled the surge of innovation that produced the computer chip and the PC. “No one better demonstrated the virtues of American free enterprise – particularly the low‐tax, low‐regulation variety beloved by Reagan – than high‐tech entrepreneurs,” historian Margaret O'Mara writes.¹⁴

To turn high‐tech entrepreneurship into the perfect vehicle for a newly powerful libertarian ideology, one has to ignore some crucial facts, like the role of government in establishing Silicon Valley and the role of support systems of all kinds in building businesses. But since when have facts ever bothered marketers, politicians, or myth‐makers?

As a politician, if you could equate software – easy and cheap – with innovation and job growth, it could safely be outsourced to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Democrats could reserve money for social programs. The newly libertarian Republicans could argue for across‐the‐board budget cuts or a shift in power to the states. And both could take advantage of a new, romantic, politically expedient American hero. An updated version of the lone cowboy: the risk‐takers; the entrepreneurs.^vi

The word entrepreneur came to take on a new meaning, a high‐tech meaning. And the companies that were important in this new age of entrepreneurship were high‐tech companies that often seemed to have one overriding purpose: to deliver returns to investors. They needed to look as if they can be very profitable at a considerable size. They needed to, in the language of the Valley, “scale.”

Today, America is home to many big companies, many of them technology businesses that grew out of the Silicon Valley machine. They dominate our country's headlines, mindshare, and financial markets. And the very word entrepreneurship has been seemingly co‐opted by this tech elite. We no longer think of the corner shop owner, restaurateur, or tailor as an entrepreneur, as they once were considered. This shifted our thinking about who really drives our economy and who deserves our support. The success of high‐tech entrepreneurs hides both the truth and some of the alarming trends taking shape at the small end of the American economy.^vii

One of the reasons that high‐tech entrepreneurship has taken such a hold on our imaginations is that its rise is entwined with the idea that free markets produce the greatest benefit for the most people. Now, the consequences of libertarianism are becoming clearer in the first decades of the twenty‐first century, including the negative economic consequences of a society without a safety net. If the underlying assumption is wrong we should question what innovations and founders are being ignored because of a mistaken idea that today's big businesses are the product solely of the private sector and unfettered free markets.

Because, as we discovered when we went out to find and talk to New Builders, the real story of American business is about small. Some of the most important businesses stay that way and become part of a collective whole that is far greater than its individual parts. Other businesses grow and create success on a different scale, sometimes measured in terms of profit or sales, and sometimes in other ways, like employment, technological advancement, or influence – but it's very difficult, if not impossible to predict which companies will grow. An environment that supports small businesses, not just a subset of them, is necessary for the economic vitality of the American economy. This is not to take anything away from tech companies, or successful larger businesses from across the business landscape and the convenience they bring to our lives. But it is worth taking a step back to consider what happens to society if the balance between big and small business gets too far out of kilter – if, in our search for convenience and lower prices, we fail to recognize what we're losing when we give up on small businesses and the unique relationship those businesses have to our communities and to our society as a whole. It will take some work to bring our economy back into better balance. It will also take a realignment in our thinking about entrepreneurship and about the role of small business in our economy.

To start, it will require a new understanding of who the next generation of American entrepreneurs actually are, and how critical it is to support them.