History shows that great companies are often built during bad times. In 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, two engineers started Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) in a garage in Northern California. Silicon Valley itself was largely created during the nasty recession of the mid-1970s. During that decade, entrepreneurs laid the groundwork for the boom of the 1980s, building companies that pioneered three new industries: Atari in the video game business, Apple (AAPL) in personal computers, and Genentech in biotechnology. ‘The only people who venture out in tough times are on a mission, which is what you need,’ says Michael Moritz, managing partner of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that invested in Apple back in the ’70s. ‘The people we are meeting are the genuine article, as opposed to the pretenders.’
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