Why Has Apple Spawned So Few Startups?

Maybe another reason why Apple spawned comparatively few startups might be that some of the areas of expertise for Apple and their employees are harder to do in startup-sized companies; namely hardware engineering and mass manufacturing innovation.<p>Apple does a lot of work in hardware and hardware manufacturing, both areas which are pretty capital-intensive and might not lead themselves as easily to the startup world.<p>Say, you are an Apple engineer working on the Ax chips for the next iPhone and have an idea for something great in CPU design, you cannot exactly rent a scalable 14nm chip fab from AWS to try to build it on your own and sell it market.

(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this)<p>My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”<p>It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.<p>I could be totally wrong about this.

Article doesn&#x27;t seem to give any evidence of this. Apple&#x27;s been around forever and former Apple (and NeXT, if you stick to the logic it&#x27;s some sort of Jobsian startup-suppression field) employees have been involved in zillions of startups over the years. EA, Danger&#x2F;Android, Nest, Flipboard come to mind.

Few compared to what? Microsoft? Google? Facebook?<p>Oh, the article doesn&#x27;t quantify what it means by &quot;few.&quot; It just throws that idea out there for no reason and then pretends it&#x27;s a thing.

Not sure if this is true - I would like to see some stats.<p>I think the problem is that the press will not write about some founder as &quot;ex Apple engineer&quot;, &quot;ex Oracle engineer&quot;, etc. It is not cool. The story will sell if founder are &quot;ex-Google&quot;, &quot;ex-Facebook&quot;, &quot;ex-Dropbox&quot;, &quot;Y-combinator&quot;, etc.<p>For example, if you are ex-Oracle, then you need to have significant revenue in order to be mentioned in the press as ex-Oracle fonder (PeopleSoft, Salesforce, Sibel, etc.). If you are ex-Google, you need to raise 100K seed and press will say ex-Google.

Here&#x27;s one minute of methodology to throw at this question.<p>Search LinkedIn for title keyword &quot;founder&quot;, past company Apple. I get 7668 hits.<p>Same search for Google, 7277 hits. For Yahoo, 4268.

A non-techies idea of innovative might not match startup ideas of innovation. Or rephrased apple-scale innovation might not scale down to startup-scale innovation.<p>Total amount of innovation (for the sake of argument, big) divided by number of employees (staggering) equals not innovative on average and even the outliers will also suffer.<p>Its a mindcrime to say it in public, but if some successful companies are innovative, and apple is successful, that doesn&#x27;t logically follow that Apple is innovative. Rolex has a good reputation, makes nice watches that are very expensive; however they don&#x27;t sell many cesium atomic clocks which are technologically far more innovative than a mechanical or quartz movement. A timekeeping startup could sell a GPSDO that sells for less than 50 cents, that would be impressive and innovative but not very Rolex-like. Perhaps Apple is the same.

Summing up: Apple&#x27;s good pay, benefits and soaring stock.

Because Apple is not a webapp company, and webapps are the easiest and most common kind of startup.

Younger companies spawn more startups because they have many employees who just experienced the hypergrowth phase of going from startup to known company. These employees have not only the right experience to start a company, they want to recreate the experience.

Like others, I&#x27;m not sure that Apple has spawned few startups. The evidence here is weak.<p>Apple&#x27;s innovations have been primarily about hardware design. I would think there are many fewer hardware startups than software startups due to the amount of capital required to build hardware. It might be more apropos to compare the number of startups from other hardware companies (Intel, Nvidia, TI, HP, Sun).

Maybe it&#x27;s because the company DNA attracts less entrepreneurial minded employees in the first place than for example Google. I think that people working for Apple:<p>- like to have a strong leader in front of them (or at least used to when Jobs was around).<p>- are engineers comfortable to be less at the center of product development than at other big tech companies.<p>Whereas an entrepreneurial-minded person is famously rather reluctant to subordination. Exceptions confirm the rule.

Because no one ever leaves!

UpThere?

Curious

For some reason the only Apple-spawned startups that come to my mind are the ones that ultimately failed, like Be, Inc.

Perhaps people with an innovative or entrepreneurial bent don&#x27;t gravitate to Apple in the first place, even if they love Apple products.