Raffi Amit | Wharton professor | Eric Wheel | executive recruiter

It may be a sign of the area’s maturity — or simple shell shock — that so much caution, even introspection, is balancing every call for revolution. Silicon Valley is still a chastened place, and that could ensure that sustainable businesses emerge as the area picks up speed. Raffi Amit, the Wharton professor, believes today’s companies are much more careful with the money they raise; they spend it on developing products and services instead of blowing it on expensive brand-building and PR campaigns. “People are a lot more responsible now,” he says. “An important lesson was learned, and that’s why I think this rebound will be a lot more stable and robust.”

One would hope. History hints at a different story, though. The boom-and-bust cycle has repeated itself here over and over. Eric Wheel, an executive recruiter with Prince­ton Search Group, remembers how VC money for biotech companies dried up in the mid-1990s because investors saw Inter­net companies as a faster route to riches. That way, investors could skip biotech’s long product-development cycles and drawn-out FDA approvals — and get right to a rich IPO with a dot-com business.

If a new path to quick cash pops up, will the same people fall again? It’s hard to say. What history does make clear is that Silicon Valley is too resilient and adaptable to be counted out. “In the short term, I don’t know. It depends on a bunch of little factors,” says Band of Angels’ Sobieski. “But long term, I’m bullish on America, and bullish on Silicon Valley.”

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