Start-Up: the book

I discovered yesterday the new 2008 Academic Ranking of World Universities done by the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (IHE-SJTU). Again the USA has the lion share: 8 in the top 10 and 17 in the top 20. Only the UK (Cambridge and Oxford) and Japan (Tokyo) enter the list. You can assess the ranking in more details with the full 500 ranking if you wish.

When I published “Start-Up”, I had a conversation with Christophe Alix, a journalist at Libération who told me that I forgot one thing in my explanations of the US superiority in innovation, i.e. the huge budget of the Pentagon. I certainly do not disagree and address the issue further below with a book I am just reading:

“Creating the Cold War University- The Transformation of Stanford” by Rebecca S. Lowen is an interesting book about how Stanford became wealthy in the 50’s and the 60’s thanks to federal money and industry contracts. Frederick Terman, often credited as being the father of Silicon Valley, called it a “Win-Win-Win” situation. The government funded basic and applied research (the difference between the two was often fuzzy) to develop military applications during the Cold War, the industry developed the products from the results of the research (and did not always have to directly fund the research), and companies like H-P, Varian, GE benefited greatly the effort. Finally Stanford became wealthy as well as excellent in research (which it was not in the 30’s).

Lowen explains that “by 1960, the federal government was spending close to $1B for academic research and university-affiliated research centers, 79 percent of which went to just twenty universities, including Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, MIT, Harvard and the University of Michigan” (page147). In the Shanghai ranking, Harvard is #1, Stanford is #2, Berkeley is #3, MIT is #5, Caltech is #6 and Michigan #18 only.

Money definitely helps. I had however reacted against Alix’ argument as military money can not explain by itself the entrepreneurial spirit that Boston and Silicon Valley developed. Caltech and its JPL laboratory never reached the same start-up activity. But the quality of universities and their wealth is an extremely strong ingredient for successful technology clusters.

The book by Leander Kahney is interesting as it shows how Steve Jobs is unique in the high-tech world. Let me just mention a single example: “But unlike a lot of people in product marketing those days who would go out and do customer testing, asking people what they wanted, Steve didn’t believe in that. He said ‘How can I possibly ask someone what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphics-based computer is? No one has ever seen one before’.” …and… “Like Henry Ford once said: ‘If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse’. ” (pages 63-64).

If you like this, you’ll enjoy the book. Thanks to Jacques for recommending it.

I just played with Wordle, a nice tool which randomly creates a cloud of words representing a blog. I did it with mine as you may see below. Another picture is on the French page. Have fun too with yours!

Too much organization harms Innovation

These are the title and subtitle of a brilliant paper (inFrench only) by Julien Tarby in the Nouvel Economiste dated June 5, 2008. His article echoes my worries about innovation in Europe. His analysis is really interesting. Among other examples, he quotes:

- Samuel Kortum et Josh Lerner: 1 euro invested in venture capital has a 10x return over 1 euro spent in the traditional R&D of companies

- Pascal Picq, a paleo-anthropologue, who develops the evolution theory applied to the enterprise: start-ups which adapt to survive are Darwinian. “Unfortunately the French education system remains Lamarckian, and considers that organizations improve in a development scheme (administration, big companies). It is the country of the planned projects (planes, trains) and not of disuptions. This culture of the norm does not tolerate variability, trial and error and it induces the development of the [existing] fields of excellence and not the creation of new fields.”

If you read French, and because it is free, you shoud run and download it!

I had the pleasure to be interviewed on the book “Start-Up” by Doris Obermair. The text is available in Spanish as well as in English in the magazine If… La Revista de Innovation : Más pasión y sueños, menos infraestructura y experiencia (english version)

and the video (in English) is available on the web site Infonomia.

Finally, I will attend the Ifest conference on July 10-11 to talk about the topic of my book. Because of the diversity of the attendants, I think it will be a great event.

Another great book, so great I decide to write this post even if I have not finished reading it: Jessica Livingston in Founders at Work has interviewed 32 entrepreneurs about their story. The lessons are convincing, fascinating. Without asking for copyright, I copy here some quotes. The book is just a pleasure to read even if sometimes the Q&A are too specific about the start-up, but I assume it is part of the exercise. A Must-Read.

Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail about Risk Taking

As I say, for people, it depends on their situation if they can take that risk of joining a startup or moving to a new city if they don’t live in the right place. For me, I was actually single at the time, I didn’t have a mortgage, so the idea of joining a little startup that may well be destroyed was just like, “That will be fun.” Because I kind of thought, “Even if Google doesn’t make it, it will be educational and I’ll learn something.” Honestly, I was pretty sure AltaVista was going to destroy Google.

Mike Ramsay, founder of Tivo about Silicon Valley

I was curious to see what’s the attitude of a typical startup in Scotland compared to here. I found that they are just culturally a whole lot more conservative and cautious. And somewhat lacking in self-confidence. You come over here and . . . I had a meeting recently with a couple of early 20-year-olds who have decided to drop out of Stanford because they got bored, and they are trying to raise money to fund their startup. They believe they can do it, and nothing’s going to hold them back. They have confidence, they have that spirit, which I think is great and is probably unique to this part of the world. Being part of that for so long, for me, has been very invigorating.

Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us about implementing

But the guy who says, “I have a great idea and I’m looking for other people to implement it,” I’m wary of—frequently because I think the process of idea-making relies on executing and failing or succeeding at the ideas, so that you can actually become better at coming up with ideas.

and about VCs

In general, I found VCs to be significantly politer than the folks I worked with. The worst they did was not call me back. I’d never hear from them again. Brad Feld does a nice blog talking about how the VC process works. He says they never call you back to say no—they don’t want to close the door in case they want to open it again, but they don’t want to actually give you a response. Very few VCs actually said, “Sorry, we’re not interested.”

Craig Newmark, founder of craiglist on the definition of start-up

“in the conventional sense, we were never a startup. In the conventional sense, a startup is a company, maybe with great ideas, that becomes a serious corporation. It usually takes serious investment, has a strategy, and they want to make a lot of money.”

They are not many, those who can talk about innovation as well as John Hennessy, President of Stanford University, start-up founder such as MIPS and Atheros, board member of Cisco and Google. He is also a world-renowned specialist in computer science.

In a recent column of the Stanford Magazine, “the DNA of Innovation”, he mentions the three ingredients that are central of a spirit of innovation:

- people, a diverse mix of talents and approaches

- an environment that promotes risk-taking and innovative thinking

- a university must be adept at transferring knowledge to organizations that have the ability to convert that knowledge into something with broader impact.

The full article is worth reading. I also scanned it in pdf format.

Is there anything nicer than being interviewed by your Alma Mater. The Stanford School of Engineering asked me why I wrote “Start-Up” and for whom. You will find it on the Stanford SOE web site. I tried to explain that the book is not (only) about the innovation infrastructure which failed in Europe but (mostly) about the need to encourage young individuals in taking more risks. A debate about nature and culture which I develop at length in the book.

Nurturing Science-based Ventures - An International Case Perspective by Seifert, Ralf W., Leleux, Benoît F., Tucci, Christopher L.

A new book about start-ups has recently been published and it is mainly centered on Swiss (including EPFL) ventures. The authors do indeed have a strong knowledge of this environment as they are faculties from IMD or EPFL. What is unique with this book is that it does not describe success stories only, but also failures or not famous firms. Indeed failures are often better lessons than successes. You do not always know why you succeed and it may be easier to understand a failure. The authors have built their book as a process and describe in detail the development of start-ups; they begin with the opportunity recognition (chapter 1), they follow with writing a business plan (chapter2), financing a start-up (chapter 3), growing a company (chapter 4) to finally harvesting value creation (chapter 5). The final chapter is dedicated to corporate entrepreneurship (“Intra-preneurship”). I have not read it yet (it is more than 700 pages!) but the numerous case studies (more than 20) look rich and detailed. It is not the first book on the subject but it might be the first one with such a focus on European start-ups.

The Stanford Venture Technology Program is one of the best source of info I know about start-ups. In one of their recent newsletter, they mention a video of Vinod Khosla (a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and former venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins). STVP summarizes his views as follows:

“Launching a start-up is not a rational act. And Vinod Khosla, a partner in Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and former Sun Microsystems CEO, believes that success only comes from those who are foolish enough to think unreasonably. Entrepreneurs need to stretch themselves beyond convention and constraint to reach something extraordinary.”