iPAtS

Monday, January 22, 2007

Strength in Pairs

From Forbes.com
http://www.forbes.com/home/free_forbes/2005/1031/045.html

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What's the best advice one could give a young entrepreneur? Find a partner with complementary skills. It's no coincidence that so many of today's thriving high-tech firms began as partnerships.

Bill Hewlett and David Packard teamed up in the 1930s. Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel in 1968. During the 1970s Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple Computer; Larry Ellison and Bob Miner, Oracle; Roger Marino and Dick Egan, EMC; and Jim Goodnight and John Sall, SAS Institute.

During the 1980s John Warnock and Charles Geschke left the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to found Adobe Systems. Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a husband-and-wife team working at Stanford University, hatched Cisco. And Scott Cook and Tom Proulx founded Intuit. The 1990s gave us Yahoo founders David Filo and Jerry Yang and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. This decade has seen Skype, founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.

Pairings work. The companies cited above have a value approaching a trillion dollars.
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