Word: startingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...many scholars and business leaders, from the Bay Area to Boston, are beginning to voice concern about what Harvard Economist Robert Reich has dubbed "chronic entrepreneurialism." These contrarians contend that America's obsession with start-up companies is undermining U.S. competitive strength. They blame the proliferation of small companies for an alarming loss of U.S. market share in strategic high-tech businesses, ranging from semiconductors to fiber optics. The constant sprouting of new ventures, they explain, may be weakening the U.S. industrial structure by splintering American manufacturing power into too many small pieces...
...recent book Trading Places, the flight of budding entrepreneurs from large heavily capitalized corporations is wounding the very U.S. companies that are most capable of competing with the sprawling industrial giants of Japan. Even some leading entrepreneurs, mostly those whose brainchildren are now billion-dollar companies, say the start-up craze has gone too far. Gordon Moore, chairman and co-founder of Intel, the chipmaker based in Santa Clara, Calif. (1987 revenues: $1.9 billion), says "vulture capitalists" have lured away some of his best technicians with offers of seed money to start their own firms...
...entrepreneurs know that if they succeed they can reap far greater financial rewards than can the most generously salaried worker. An estimated 2 million U.S. men and women are millionaires, and nearly 90% of them earned their fortune by starting their own firm. The small-business boom shows no signs of slowing. Even last October's stock-market crash discouraged start-ups only briefly. Jane Morris, editor of the Venture Capital Journal, reckons that venture funding for new enterprises this year may surpass last year's record of $3.9 billion...
...sharply different conclusions in essays published earlier this year by the Harvard Business Review. Supply-Sider George Gilder, author of the book The Spirit of Enterprise, cites the roaring success of several of the newest Silicon Valley semiconductor firms -- including Chips & Technologies and Cypress Semiconductor -- as proof that such start-ups are the best hope for continued U.S. economic growth. In what Gilder calls the "law of the microcosm," he contends that the use of computers has given individuals more opportunity to innovate. Says he: "As circuitry is compressed onto single chips, it enhances enormously the power of individual designers...
...Charles Ferguson, a former IBM analyst who is now a research associate at M.I.T.'s Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development, argues that the U.S. semiconductor industry is collapsing because start-ups have siphoned off talented engineers from larger firms. Example: in 1981 a group of Intel executives started Seeq Technology (1987 revenues: $44.6 million) to develop sophisticated memory chips. Four years later, three Seeq employees specializing in such chips quit to form their own company, Atmel...