Insourcing

Om Malik, trade journalist turned Net publisher (GigaOm.com), threw a party for tech founders last night in San Francisco to announce the launch of his microsite, Foundry.com. Of course, most of the attendees were men -- Marc Andreesen, David Sifry, Kevin Rose, Bram Cohen, James HotorNot Hong, and the ubiquitous Michael Arrington. Although I saw Kim Polese's name on the guest list, she was a no show. Most of the women except for Andreesen's cofounder Gina  Bianchini and triple-time CEO Mable Yee were either waitresses, reporters (Carleen Hawn is an editor with Foundry), or somewhere inbetween, such as myself.

Besides Om, there were lots of founders hailing from India, who like Om, had learned to tweak the Silicon Valley startup-system to achieve success. Although I've never been to India, it seems to me from working with Indian clients that their culture fosters an entrepreneurial adventurism perfectly adaptable to the valley ethos.

Sometimes it seems as if there is more similarity between Indian and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than between U.S. tech founders of different genders.

Comments

[mbjesq]

I see creative enterprise in India very differently. Entreprenuerism in India is a very rare and courageous thing here – at least for the middle class and upward. (Those lower in the economic pecking order display an astonishing, if not always creative economic self-reliance and initiative, if only as a matter of survival.) It would hardly surprise me to find Indian entrepreneurs at a party in honor of tech founders thrown by Om Malik. But the shocking thing in India, given the enormous success of tech, is how few entrepreneurs there are, not how many.

I have just posted a more complete discussion of this interesting topic on my blog (http://www.memestream.org) in an essay entitled "The Auntie-Factor and the Myth of Indian Entrepreneurism."

[Dan]

Om Malik's project is called FoundRead -- foundread.com -- if anyone's looking for it on the Internets.