The Silicon Valley myth doesn’t leave much room for companies that are neither raging successes nor spectacular flameouts. But to fully understand the tech industry and ensure that its goals don’t go off the rails, we need to talk more about the companies that are in the meh middle. |
You probably know the myth I’m referring to. There are wild stories of companies that started from almost nothing and grew up to become Apple, Facebook or Uber. Then there are the horror stories of start-ups that burned bright and spectacularly flopped like the first iteration of the office rental start-up WeWork and the blood testing company Theranos. |
Those polar opposites are the start-ups that people write books and make movies about. The untouchables and the unforgivables are the images that we hold in our minds of technology companies. |
But most of life isn’t success or failure, it’s the mushy in-between, and this applies to most start-ups, too. There exists a vast middle ground of overlooked young tech companies that are definitely not winners but are not losers, either. |
I’m talking about companies like Dropbox, Box and Cloudera that were once hot enough to be on the covers of business magazines and have survived but hardly set the world on fire. They are not whales nor are they minnows. Dropbox, a digital file-storage service, is worth about as much as Levi Strauss. |
SILICON VALLEY - BOOM AND BUST
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