Is cooperation more powerful than competition?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

People helping people, in business. So much for the idea of competition.

We’re all in this together – The Chips are Down
in 1962 Walker’s Wagon Wheel Bar/Restaurant in Mountain View became the lunch hangout for employees at Fairchild Semiconductor. When the first spinouts began to leave Fairchild, they discovered that fabricating semiconductors reliably was a black art. At times you’d have the recipe and turn out chips, and the next week something would go wrong, and your fab couldn’t make anything that would work. Engineers in the very small world of silicon and semiconductors would meet at the Wagon Wheel and swap technical problems and solutions with co-workers and competitors.


More about ethnic group ties in Silicon Valley.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://steveblank.com/2011/09/15/the-pay-it-forward-culture/
  2. 2
    http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~anno/Papers/terman.html
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