
Why Weren't Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google & Microsoft Created By Incubators? - quickquestion
What made these tech giants different from other incubating companies?
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orionblastar
They had money from the start.

Bill Gates was born rich, had rich friends.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak sold everything they owned to have the money to
start up in a garage and got a business loan. Before that they made money
selling blue boxes at college, and Interned at HP and Atari and saved their
money. Once the Apple I was a hit, they had little to no competition because
the market was young. So they reinvested the Apple I sales into the Apple II.
But they got the attention of rich friends who helped them grow the company
with investments.

Google, Amazon, and Facebook are all Internet Age companies, having rich
friends helped them get the money to start their companies up.

None of them had incubators because there wasn't such a thing available,
instead they had rich friends or were rich or attracted rich friends.

Apple and Microsoft if starting out today, couldn't make it in the current
market, even with an incubator. They got started in the market very early and
then marketed their products so that they got loyal users and their own brand.

~~~
quickquestion
\- WOW. 1st of all, thank you for the response. I really appreciate it. So do
you think that these companies will always be the best? Always be tech giants?
Also do you think the best thing for startups to do is to get money from rich
friends rather than get into an incubator's program? I will really like your
answer on these questions.

~~~
shanelja
I only really feel qualified to answer the first and second questions you pose
to the parent:

Firstly, we live in a new age, home computing as we know it is less than 50
years old, the industry is still growing exponentially and finding its feet,
but it is like any other industry, over time, giants come and go.

Take for example the investment bank Goldman Sachs, when the news came out,
the headlines said the bank was "too big to fail" and only a government
bailout saved it, but now it is as a company barely a shadow of it's former
self. Even the biggest companies come and go, normally at the whim of the
consumer, it's true that these companies control a large part of our mentality
when it comes to buying and selling, advertising and our opinions and feelings
towards anything they can relate to a brand in any way, but all it takes is to
lose favor with your customers and you will soon be finding yourself laying
off thousands of staff.

Simply put, these companies will _very unlikely_ always be giants, I would
guess that in 100 years only 2 of these companies will be a house hold name
(if they are lucky, or make good business choices, whatever you attribute
their continued existence and fertility to) and in 200 years, most likely one,
or none.

That isn't to say that other giants won't step up in their place, likely also
without the aid of incubators, but to use a simple anecdote, you can bring up
a Lion in captivity, and it will grow up to be a perfectly healthy Lion with a
nice mane and big, sharp teeth, but if you put it in a cage with a Lion who
had to fight it's way to survive in the harshness of the wilderness, normally,
the other Lion will tear it apart. Simply put, companies which have already
fought hard battles to get where they are, will be the ones to fight however
hard it takes to stay in that place.

~~~
quickquestion
Thank you shanelja for your response. I really appreciate it. I see where you
coming from in terms of giants not always going to be here as well as how when
two different lions are raised differently in (terms of environments) they
will have different strength. Thanks.

------
ig1
The current generation of incubators are derived from the Y-Combinator model,
YC didn't start until 2005 after all those companies were founded.

Of the 20 "billion dollar tech companies" founded since 2005, 2 were YC
companies and a third was founded by a YC alumni.

So I doubt there's a directly correlation between whether you go through an
accelerator and being a huge success.

~~~
6thSigma
How many $20 billion tech companies have been founded since 2005?

~~~
quickquestion
\- I don't know about $20 billion 6thsigma but from this link ~>
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnrABZ3E0SpidDF...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnrABZ3E0SpidDFMUm1ocFF1ZHBUcHViTk9mQW51c1E&pli=1#gid=0)
many billion companies have been found. Thank you for your response 6thSigma.
I really appreciate it.

