Let's ask BT where the next Skype is coming from

[Dave Birch] Some years ago, I wandered into work one morning to find the client I was working for absolutely furious. The client was an American, and he was reading about a presidential "power breakfast" or some such. It was to bring business leaders together with the White House to do something about unemployment, as I recall. My client pointed out that the people invited to the breakfast (the usual suspects: General Motors, Citi etc) employed a small number of people, in subsectors that had very special drivers, and that the single largest employer in the US at the time was Manpower, who were not at the breakfast. But, as he pointed out, since almost all employment in the US in small businesses and that (I can't remember the exact statistic, but it was something like) 90% of all new jobs were being created in companies that employed less than 20 people, the President should have thrown out GM and Citi and invited in a few small businesses instead: a shopkeeper, someone starting a new company in his basement, a VC-funded started with less than 20 people, and so on.

Government is big, and backward looking, so it finds itself most comfortable dealing with big companies that have been successful in the recent past. As far as I can tell, this provides absolutely no help at all looking forward. If Google didn't invent Facebook, how will talking to the government about it help to see what's next? And Microsoft didn't invent Google, and BT didn't invent Skype, and Electronic Arts didn't invent Zynga, and so it goes.

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes