Why fewer high-profile startups come out of Apple than other major tech companies
AP Photo/Marcio Jose SanchezNest founder Tony Fadell is an Apple alum success story: Google bought his company for upwards of $3 billionOn the eve of Apple's annual developers conference, we look forward to hearing more about the company's new music streaming service and how it plans to improve its new smartwatch.
But while excitement for the conference swirls, The Mercury News' Julia Love highlights an "odd but undeniable" fact about the company.
"Apple, a seeming hotbed of creativity, has spawned surprisingly few high-profile startups," she writes.
Venky Ganesan, a VC with Menlo Ventures, estimates for Love that ex-Apple employees have launched 50% fewer startups than other major companies like Google, Yahoo, and PayPal.
Threads on the question-and-answer site Quora lists 63 startups to come out of Google versus 33 out of Apple. It's an un-scientific estimate, but just about in-line with Ganesan's hypothesis.
Love lists a few reasons why this might be true:
- Apple as a company values secrecy. People who leave to start their own companies sometimes forget that startups need to have the opposite mindset - they need as much publicity as possible to take off.
- Most major decisions are top-down at Apple. At a startup, everyone is often working on everything, with choices being made on the fly. Apple alumni may try to dictate too many decisions at the get-go.
- Individual Apple employees don't get much outside recognition and often don't start doing much networking until after they leave - "setting them back in the startup race," according to Ganesan.
- Because Apple doesn't acquire many big companies, it doesn't employ as many serial entrepreneurs, who could leave to start new things.
- Look at Apple's stock price right now. It's a good time to stick around!
"I had a lot of bad habits when I came out of Apple," Matt MacInnis, who left to start a company called Inkling, told Love. "It took me years to break them."
Business Insider asked Apple alum Tim Bucher what he thought about the story's arguments. Bucher, the founder and CEO of a photo storage and sharing startup called Lyve, was once Apple's SVP of Macintosh engineering. He says that he thinks that the company used to have more of an entrepreneurial spirit internally than it does now.
"I would agree with [Love's] assessment somewhat," he said via email. "There are a lot of folks who just do what they're told (and do it well) vs. expressing their opinions on what they truly believe should be done at Apple. You couple that with the fact that the company is doing so well and isn't 'hungry,' and it can evolve into a non-entrepreneurial culture. In the bad days at Apple, when Apple had to 'innovate our way out' (quote from Mr. Jobs), it spawned a ton of fire-breathing entrepreneurs internally."
Read the rest of Love's article - packed with quotes from other former Apple employees - here.