Apple, Google, Amazon: Garage startups rule the world, and here’s why

A workshop in a garage. Image courtesy: Unsplash

The following is an edited excerpt taken from Entresutra, on the shoulders of foxes: A hedgehog on entrepreneurship and motivation, authored by Soumodip Sarkar. The excerpt is published courtesy of Bloomsbury.

The garage metaphor is evocative and synonymous with the entrepreneurial phenomenon. The “garage” conjures an image of bootstrap dynamism and success, so much so that a very prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm headed by co-founder Guy Kawasaki has been christened Garage Technology Ventures.

While the startup “garage” culture is much more ingrained in the United States than elsewhere, many European and Japanese giants can also trace their origins to such humble spaces. Surprisingly even India, a country that doesn’t boast of many garages to begin with, has its own garage story.

India’s large biopharmaceutical company, Biocon had started out in a garage of a rented house in Bangalore, in 1978. With a seed capital of Rs 10000 (less than $200), entrepreneur Kiran Mazumdar Shaw set up a company which today has revenues inching towards the half a billion-dollar mark.

The garage metaphor operates at both the level of the entrepreneurial psyche, as well as at a subtler and important level, in terms of the role that the “garage” plays in the entrepreneurial process. Holistically, the “garage” can be read along at least four different dimensions.

The garage as a goal

First, the “garage” represents an inspirational ideal. It is a metaphor that symbolizes the dynamism of the early prototypical phase of entrepreneurship. This phase involves some fundamental aspects of the entrepreneurial path—grit, hard work, independence, the freedom of working for oneself, humble origins, as well as old-fashioned ingenuity.

We can safely say that a startup can be seeded and nurtured in other unlikely and unpretentious places as well

startups from garages, and other unassuming places like the garage, permit us to delve into the following question. What does a startup really need in terms of the supporting infrastructure? As we have seen, the early, mostly prototypical stage of many of today’s giant enterprises, had been incubated in garages, basements, dorm rooms, bedrooms, kitchens etc., we can safely say that a startup can be seeded and nurtured in other unlikely and unpretentious places as well.

In strategic terms, the location and the cost of the ‘incubator’ can be far more important than the actual size, the condition or the elegance of the place. The smaller bootstrap the startup costs, the lesser the strains on the fledgling enterprise.

The garage as independence

The iconic Google garage. Image courtesy: Flickr

Second, this also enables the entrepreneur to delay the often inevitable roping in of external funds, such as from business angels or venture capitalists.

This bare-essentials strategy can be seen in the case of Google. Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, actually moved into the Menlo Park garage in 1998, after having managed to convince Sun co-founder, Andy Bechtolsheim to write out a cheque. With the money and the confidence that came from this important mentor, they could easily have had opted to go in for a space more than a garage, but they didn’t.

The garage as effectual reasoning

The garage as public policy