is a tech entrepreneur, academic, researcher and writer who sometimes stirs up a hornet's nest of controversy. You can leave a comment to start a discussion!
“When Obama became President, there was a lot of excitement about Government. Respected academics, like my former Dean at Duke, Kristina Johnson, left their jobs to help change the world. Nearly all of these people became disenchanted. Government jobs are considered drab and bureaucratic again—like they used to be.”
Vivek Wadhwa on the resignation of Vivek Kundra, the Federal Government’s first Chief Information Officer (CIO)
“Unable to get a visa that would allow him to start a company after he graduated from Wharton in 2007, Kunal returned home to India. In February 2010, he started SnapDeal—India’s Groupon. Instead of creating hundreds of jobs in the U.S., Kunal ended up creating them in New Delhi.
At a time when our economy is stagnating, some American political leaders are working to keep the world’s best and brightest out. They mistakenly believe that skilled immigrants take American jobs away. The opposite is true: skilled immigrants start the majority of Silicon Valley startups; they create jobs.” – Vivek Wadhwa
In the tech world, patents don’t foster innovation; they inhibit it. They are like nuclear weapons in an arms race, in that companies use them to hold competitors back or to extort license fees from companies that can’t afford the time and cost of litigation.
These battles play out every week in Silicon Valley: among the behemoths—Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SAP—and between behemoths, startups, patent trolls, and large corporations. Startup entrepreneurs live in constant fear that behemoths or patent trolls will bankrupt them with frivolous lawsuits.
A genome test—which would have cost over a billion dollars two decades ago—will soon cost less than $100. Advances in genome testing, it is postulated, may make it possible to create personalized drug formulations.
The young company founder—who previously had been unable to make ends meet—was seen driving around in a fancy red Corvette. When confronted, he retorted that he hadn’t started his business to live the life of a hermit; he needed to keep his girlfriend happy and enjoy life.
Tech Crunch founder Mike Arrington said that he didn’t learn much from college; gaining admittance to a Berkeley or Harvard is the only certification a student needs; dropping out from college doesn’t carry a stigma anymore; so “the best thing in the world is to go to Harvard for a year and drop out because everyone knows you were smart enough to get in”.
More than three million students travel outside their home countries to study—a 57 percent increase in just the past decade. What’s more, those extraordinary numbers are projected to nearly triple, to 8 million by 2025, says Vivek Wadhwa.
“The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are.”
Software patents are just nuclear weapons in an arms race. They don’t foster innovation, they inhibit it. That’s because things change rapidly in this industry. Speed and technological obsolescence are the only protections that matter. Fledgling startups have to worry more about some big player or patent troll pulling out a big gun and bankrupting them with a frivolous lawsuit than they do about someone stealing their ideas.
When the iPad was first announced I predicted that it would be a game changer. I really believed that this cool new device would solve the world’s technology problems and reduce the number of electronic gadgets I had to carry around.
It just doesn’t do its magic for me any longer. Here’s why…
“Over drinks (some excellent Chilean wine), the minister told me of a new program that Chile is piloting to lure bootstrappers. Chile will grant $40,000 and provide some really cheap office space and accommodation to budding entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world. All they have to do is to build their products in one of the most beautiful locations on the planet. Chile is betting that once these entrepreneurs get there, they will never want to leave.”
Introducing a new blog by Vivek Wadhwa on technology, immigration and more…
Meet the new Indian techies. Meena believes that if she works hard enough, she can build her own “big business”—maybe a Google. Girls with the ambition and confidence to enter the tech world are rare even in Silicon Valley but Meena lives in a slum in New Delhi.
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