In Silicon Valley, it seems like a dozen startups get funded by venture capitalists every day.
Yet the hard truth of numbers is that most of the billions poured into the sector are wasted, providing precious little financial return.
Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, one of the smartest (and most complicated) tech investors I know, once pointed out to me that the tech sector as a whole has created more than a trillion dollars in value over the past decade.
Yet that value creation is incredibly concentrated. Nearly two-thirds of the increase reaped by investors and employees comes from Apple and Google alone, with the likes of Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, eBay, Yandex and Baidu rounding out the list.
Time For A Trillion-Dollar Talk
Rabois is joining me for an on-stage conversation at the next ReadWriteMix event in San Francisco on Wednesday, August 21. We’ll discuss this conundrum: If prospects for value creation are so unevenly distributed, how do investors bet on the right companies?
Sign up for ReadWriteMix with Keith Rabois, Wednesday, Aug. 21.
We’ll also talk about his formative years as an entrepreneurial executive and angel investor, joining the management teams of PayPal, LinkedIn, and Slide, and Square in their early stages and backing Yelp, Airbnb and Yammer.
Rabois is also unmissable on Twitter, where he zings the likes of Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley (and gets zinged right back). He’s made a career out of speaking his mind. We don’t expect the night of ReadWriteMix to be any different.
Sign up on Eventbrite for ReadWriteMix, an evening of drinks and conversation at Say Space in San Francisco, hosted by ReadWrite editor-in-chief Owen Thomas.
Photo by Fortune Live Media
