The Influence Of The Covid 19 Pandemic On Startup Funding In Silicon Valley

Master's Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 7.5, University of Amsterdam, language: English, abstract: Silicon Valley is home to 6 out of the 10 most valuable companies in the world and is considered to be the worldwide leader in venture capital. However, at the same time, the area faces the highest living costs and business expenses in the nation. Reports suggest that people and businesses have been leaving the area due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study takes a time series analysis approach in order to determine whether there has been a structural change in Silicon Valley’s startup funding activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. A dataset of 13,350 funding rounds in Silicon Valley from 2016 to 2020 has been collected from Crunchbase. The time series analysis is conducted in R using the Strucchange package and Chow tests. Results suggest that no structural change has occurred in the total startup funding activity or in the proportion of early-stage investments during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Way Forward for Entrepreneurship Around the World We are in the midst of a startup revolution. The growth and proliferation of innovation-driven startup activity is profound, unprecedented, and global in scope. Today, it is understood that communities of support and knowledge-sharing go along with other resources. The importance of collaboration and a long-term commitment has gained wider acceptance. These principles are adopted in many startup communities throughout the world. And yet, much more work is needed. Startup activity is highly concentrated in large cities. Governments and other actors such as large corporations and universities are not collaborating with each other nor with entrepreneurs as well as they could. Too often, these actors try to control activity or impose their view from the top-down, rather than supporting an environment that is led from the bottom-up. We continue to see a disconnect between an entrepreneurial mindset and that of many actors who wish to engage with and support entrepreneurship. There are structural reasons for this, but we can overcome many of these obstacles with appropriate focus and sustained practice. No one tells this story better than Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway. The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem explores what makes startup communities thrive and how to improve collaboration in these rapidly evolving, complex environments. The Startup Community Way is an explanatory guide for startup communities. Rooted in the theory of complex systems, this book establishes the systemic properties of entrepreneurial ecosystems and explains why their complex nature leads people to make predictable mistakes. As complex systems, value creation occurs in startup communities primarily through the interaction of the "parts" - the people, organizations, resources, and conditions involved - not the parts themselves. This continual process of bottom-up interactions unfolds naturally, producing value in novel and unexpected ways. Through these complex, emergent processes, the whole becomes greater and substantially different than what the parts alone could produce. Because of this, participants must take a fundamentally different approach than is common in much of our civic and professional lives. Participants must take a whole-system view, rather than simply trying to optimize their individual part. They must prioritize experimentation and learning over planning and execution. Complex systems are uncertain and unpredictable. They cannot be controlled, only guided and influenced. Each startup community is unique. Replication is enticing but impossible. The race to become "The Next Silicon Valley" is futile - even Silicon Valley couldn't recreate itself. This book: Offers practical advice for entrepreneurs, community builders, government officials, and other stakeholders who want to harness the power of entrepreneurship in their city Describes the core components of startup communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems, as well as an explanation of the differences between these two related, but distinct concepts Advances a new framework for effective startup community building based on the theory of complex systems and insights from systems thinking Includes contributions from leading entrepreneurial voices Is a must-have resource for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, executives, business and community leaders, economic development authorities, policymakers, university officials, and anyone wishing to understand how startup communities work anywhere in the world

Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good. Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good. "Lucid, probing and urgent. Wendy Liu manages to be both optimistic about the emancipatory potential of tech and scathing about the industry that has harnessed it for bleak and self-serving ends." -- Naomi Klein, author of On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal "An inspiring memoir manifesto...Technologists all over the world are realizing that no amount of code can substitute for political engagement. Liu's memoir is a road map for that journey of realization." -- Cory Doctorow, author of Radicalized and Little Brother Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What's not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it's hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It's becoming clear that the tech industry's promised "innovation" is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual founders and companies that characterise the industry today, Wendy Liu delves into the structural factors of the economy that gave rise to Silicon Valley as we know it. Ultimately, she proposes a more radical way of developing technology, where innovation is conducted for the benefit of society at large, and not just to enrich a select few.

"Early indicators suggest that startup activity is heavily disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdown. At the same time, empirical evidence has shown that such disturbances may have long-lasting effects on aggregate employment. This paper presents a calculator which can be used to compute these effects under different scenarios regarding (i) the number of startups, (ii) the growth potential of startups, and (iii) the survival rate of young firms. The authors find that employment losses can be substantial and last for more than a decade, even when the assumed slump in startup activity is only short-lived."--Abstract.

Fintech, a combination of the words “financial” and “technology” is a relatively new and often nebulous term that applies to any emerging technology that help consumers or financial institutions. Who Should Read This Book Let me assure you, an article or book which is based on the finance industry is always a treat to go through. However, the audience for this book ideally would be people who wish to have in-depth knowledge about Fundacle Fintech product, also people who wish to have a detailed understanding of the Fintech industry. •Any individual/institution who are already using another fintech product. •Businessman / Business Seller / Innovations / Investors / Financial advisors who wish to have step by step usage of Fundacle Fintech product. •Finance college students who wish to be aware of fintech product they wish to use once they go into the real market of the finance industry. •Probable Country Level Joint Venture owners of Fundacle who wish to have a detailed analysis. •Government / Central Bank who wish to deploy Fundacle at country level for regulatory purpose. •Philanthropist who are looking to spread money to the most rightful businesses which have an impact based on their social goals. Socio-economic impact studies measure and monetize the economic, social, environmental and financial costs, benefits for all stakeholders of a project or public policy over its lifetime. By translating the costs and benefits into a monetary unit, socio-economic evaluation allows the following indicators to be derived - •The net creation of collective value (socio-economic NDV) •The socio-economic return •The collective value per US Dollars invested (socio-economic ROI) Fundacle being a Fintech platform that is free for the general public would enhance the current financial ecosystem and fill the gap for global fintech product being the financial networking platform, similarly to Facebook being a platform for social networking.

Of course, anyone would want to wake up from a really bad dream - especially one that seemed like it may never end, while successively stripping away joys and conveniences of our modern living. The COVID-19 pandemic bestowed on us a collective nightmare experience of varying intensity, akin to a "Black Swan" event, as author and mathematical philosopher Nassim Taleb might describe—given its universal rarity and devastating effects and seeming predictability in hindsight. However, we may remember this remarkable time in our history rather as a "White Swan" event—one that catalyzed a more common occurrence of evolving Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles, a mainstreaming of sustainability—fueled by the digital innovations that designed ways to survive and thrive into a new, and more holistic, world order. Now, as we emerge from the remnants of the pandemic’s aftermath, we find ourselves at the late dawn of a new geologic epoch—the "Anthropocene"—where the impact of humans on the planet’s geology and ecosystems looms so monumentally that the gravest threat to our existence stems from our own actions. Contained within these pages, you will discover insights from leaders across diverse domains—community, industry, public administration, and the investment community. Through their own experiences, we unfurl "White Swan sightings"— moments when sustainability flourished in response to reverberations of the COVID-19 virus. More poignantly, the journey ahead carries us beyond the realm of the Black Swan, while the acceleration of digital innovations equips us to herald a new era out of the Anthropocene and into a new one, with sustainability innovations as a critical placemat. The humanistic seismic shifts caused by the Pandemic will generate a future of holistic interoperability between digital and organic matters. We are on the brink of designing unprecedented harmony with each other and equilibrium of regenerative growth with the world around us. The urgency has never been greater, nor the possibilities so profound.

This systematic analysis of everyday life inside a tech startup dissects the logic of venture capital and its consequences for entrepreneurs, workers, and societies. In recent years, dreams about our technological future have soured as digital platforms have undermined privacy, eroded labor rights, and weakened democratic discourse. In light of the negative consequences of innovation, some blame harmful algorithms or greedy CEOs. Behind the Startup focuses instead on the role of capital and the influence of financiers. Drawing on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, this book examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it. Investors push startups to scale as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. Benjamin Shestakofsky shows how these demands create organizational problems that managers solve by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by these companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky compellingly argues that we must focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.

New York is rapidly changing in response to a new economy, but startups, tech workers, and venture capital are not visible unless you know where to look for them--in old industrial neighborhoods, on the waterfront, and at events like hackathons and meetups. In The Innovation Complex, Sharon Zukin shows the people and places that shape the urban tech economy, making cities more successful for businesses yet in some ways less livable.