On its 100th birthday in 2011, IBM ran a four-page ad in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times. It said: “Nearly all the companies our grandparents admired have disappeared. Of the top 25 companies on the Fortune 500 in 1961, only six remain today.” The ad may have been designed to hail IBM's resilience, but it also highlighted a telling observation for the new companies emerging today in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
