Author Archives: Hervé Lebret

The complexity of innovation policies – the example of Malaysia

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I was lucky to meet last week two economists from the International Monetary Fund who are the authors of the working paper The Leap of the Tiger: How Malaysia Can Escape the Middle-Income Trap. It is not directly linked to high-tech innovation and I am not an economist; my expertise is limied to the nano-economics of start-ups. This being said, I was very impressed by the analysis of Reda Cherif and Fuad Hasanov.

In general, I read more about developed countries and high-tech entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley, obviously, but also the example of Israel, Finland, France, Chile… Lerner, Saxenian and Mazzucato have been important authors for me. Hasanov and Cherif explain how Malaysia tried to develop its economy and relatively failed compared to Taiwan and Korea. The reasons are complex and the interested person should read their paper.

They really show the complexity of things and again the recipe needs so much fine tuning, with no guarantee of success. The addition of Chile, Thailand and Norway in their analysis, makes it really rich. I understood that a combination of strong state support (incentives, funding, sometimes protection) and competition in the private sector (so many Korean automotive firms were initially created) with an emphasis on its ability to export is very striking. Why did Nokia succeeded for some time and not Alcatel maybe explained with their arguments. They also put a lot of emphasis in the ability to innovate, a must to enable exportations.

So Mazzucato is right, the state has an entrepreneurial role, but individual initiatives seem to be also important, something I had not necessarily understood in the cased of Taiwan and Korea. The diaspora of engineers who studied and work abroad (in the USA mostly) was instrumental to the economic development and innovation once they came back (sometimes many years later) in their home country…

Where the Small-Town American Dream Lives On

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“As America’s rural communities stagnate, what can we learn from one that hasn’t?” is the subtitle of Our Town by Larissa MacQuhar in the Nov 13, 2017 paper edition of the New Yorker. The online title is Where the Small-Town American Dream Lives On. It is a strange and fascinating analysis of America. (By the way in the same edition, you can also read The Patriot a critic of the collected nonfiction of Philip Roth, another enlightening explanation of what American-ness is.


The Chamber of Commerce in orange City, Iowa. Photograph by Brian Finke.

Towards the end of this 10-page article, the author writes: In his 1970 book, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” the economist Albert O. Hirschman described different ways of expressing discontent. Your can exit – stop buying a product, leave town. Or you can use voice – complain to the manufacturer, stay and try to change the place you live in. The easier it is to exit, the less likely it is that a problem will be fixed. That’s why the centripetal pull of Orange City was not just a conservative force; it could be a powerfully dynamic one as well. After all, it wasn’t those who fled the town who could push it onward, politically or economically -it was the ones who loved it enough to stay, or to come back.
Americans, Hirschman wrote, have always preferred “the neatness of exit over the messiness and heartbreak of voice.” Discontented Europeans staged revolutions; Americans moved on. “the curious conformism of Americans, noted by observers ever since Tocqueville, may also be explained in this fashion,” he continued. “Why raise your voice in contradiction and get yourself into trouble as long as you can always remove yourself entirely from any given environment should it become too unpleasant?”

There are many other interesting descriptions of people leaving and those staying; and of their ambitions, their motivations. I am not sure how this relates to innovation and entrepreneurship, but I remember Robert Noyce, one of Silicon Valley’s fathers with born in a small town in Iowa… and moved first to MIT for his PhD and then West.

How Do You Teach High-Tech Entrepreneurship according to Randy Komisar

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It’s the 4th time in a few days that I show the video below to people. It is rather old (dated 2004) and it is just great. A sentence I remember from the first day I watched it is the following: “I think there’s stuff you can’t possibly learn in school and I’m not even sure you can learn that on the job. There’s an entrepreneurial character. Some people have it and some people don’t. Some people may not think they have it, and they may have it. A lot of people they think they have it, and many don’t.” Here is the video and then the full transcript…

I think what can be taught, by and large, is a set of very basic skills about the various domains required for startup to succeed: finance, organizations, transactions, strategy, business models. You can get an exposure to that which can raise your entrepreneur IQ a hundred points. Because starting without that context, it could be awfully hard to understand what’s happening around you as you work in these environments let alone try to do it. I also think you can get exposure to the personality and character of entrepreneurship through the case study method in particular. You can begin to see the tortured lives that many entrepreneurs have to live in order to pursue their dreams. And you can get a sense of how that relates to your abilities to cope and to make tradeoffs in your life.

I think there’s stuff you can’t possibly learn in school and I’m not even sure you can learn that on the job. There’s an entrepreneurial character. Some people have it and some people don’t. Some people may not think they have it, and they may have it. A lot of people they think they have it, and many don’t. The entrepreneurial character is very, very comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. That entrepreneur character is very capable of understanding and targeting opportunities that others don’t see and is tenacious about their pursuit. At the same time, they remain permeable to know ideas and to course corrections from feedback from the market and from people who might have more experience or more insights than they’ve got. There’s a personality that works in this environment. And there’s a personality that I think is uncomfortable. And I try to explain this in particular in the classes that I teach. There is a badge of courage in being an entrepreneur. I mean, we sort of, you know, if you read the press and you read the local technology rags you know there is a real sense that entrepreneurs are a special super breed. They’re different. They create a lot of value. I love working with them.

But if you’re not an entrepreneur that’s OK too. There’s lots of other value to be created. There’s lots of other things to be “attacked” in the market place that maybe more appropriate. So I think you can learn a lot. And I think you can accelerate your ability to learn more by building a context. But I think ultimately you got to ask yourself a hard question. Am I suited for the uncertainties and ambiguities, the ups and downs, and the risks of being an entrepreneur, or am I not?

Facts, Truth, Courage…

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The word Start-up is controversial. Money, business are often the synonymous and at the time of the Paradise Papers, they do not have good press, with reason! I sometimes had to “defend” and I would still defend a world that is important … And more widely, I believe, we must fight to defend the importance of facts and a “dirty word”, truth, with courage. In a world where communication is confused with information (already at the beginning of the 20th century, Schumpeter explained that capitalism could not exist without marketing and advertising) it is important that the voices defending the facts, truth with courage be heard. For this reason, I have sometimes come out of the strict framework of technology, innovation and high-tech entrepreneurship to mention intellectuals who seem important to me. Harari, Piketty, Fleury, Stiegler, Picq.

A long introduction to mention a beautiful interview of Pascal Picq on France Inter this morning: “We must deconstruct male domination in Hollywood as elsewhere.” The link to the site in French is here. A brief excerpt: “Note: the bonobos, who are close to us, have not evolved like us. Homo sapiens is one of the most violent species towards its females, so women. The degrees of this violence vary according to time and culture. The dominant status is exercised with regard to Nature on the one hand, and women on the other hand. The behaviors of male dominance that are rooted in our human societies are the result of a behavioral evolution, and not of a natural and genetic determinism. In the bonobos, the female is dominant, the violence of the relations is mastered by the hedonic relations, and the bonobos live according to a model of gynocracy. The bonobos and the men did not have the same behavioral evolution. And I say that we can not blame our nature, as some do, in the principles of male dominance that have been imposed on humans. It is a behavioral evolution that has become embedded in agricultural societies and industrial societies. Historically, where foods or things are produced, men tend to take control of production and reproduction.”

I should have added that this interview is related to the Oscar granted last night to Agnès Varda for her career and coincidence or not, my previous article in French only – If you do not love me, I can tell you that I do not love you either – dealt with Sandrine Bonnaire, the actress of Agnes Varda in the magnificent Vagabond.

In all disciplines, scientific or not, complexity makes it difficult sometimes, not to say often, to assert truths. They seem sometime to be moving. But there are facts that one must always analyze as honestly as possible with courage and then we can come out with truths. Thanks to these intellectuals who work without dogma and help us understand the world.

And to finish on a “lighter” touch, here are two works by Obey whose artistic fight is magnificent!

Do Ex-Startup Founders Make The Best Venture Capitalists? (Part 2)

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Yesterday, in Do Ex-Startup Founders Make The Best Venture Capitalists? I mentioned CB Insights analysis about the background of the top VCs, and expressed my doubts about comparing founders vs. non founders. So I used the Top100 list and had a different look: what about the background in high-tech or not? Here are some charts. Quick and dirty so do not take it as a scientific analysis. Still…

First a point of caution. This list is a little strange and the authors know better than me, but I am sure this list is not highly subjective… Now it seems founders were never a majority and VCs with no high-tech experience always a majority. Now what is puzzling is that these VCs are rather young and that a high majority of them having been in the business for less the 20 years… interesting. What would have been the results of the VCs active in the 70s and 80s? Not sure…

Also the change in the last 15 years is not the ratio with a tech background, but the ones who are founders has increased and the ones with no tech background has decreased…

Do Ex-Startup Founders Make The Best Venture Capitalists?

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Interesting question as I have often claimed that there was a difference between US and European venture capitalist (VC), which had been also illustrated in the past by Tim Cruttenden (see below).

CB Insights, a leading firm analyzing data about start-ups, looked at the experience of VCs: Do Ex-Startup Founders Make The Best Venture Capitalists? The next figure illustrates their results and they additionally claim: “Of the 100 VCs, 38 founded or co-founded a company before becoming venture investors, while 62 did not. Six of CB Insights’ top 10 investors haven’t founded a company. That includes the top two: Benchmark’s Bill Gurley and the recently retired Chris Sacca.”

However interesting, I would have preferred a different analysis: how many had a direct experience in technology firms, whether in product / technology development or on the business sides such as sales or marketing compared to teh ones who were “only” consultants or bankers. This would be highly important as the value you bring t the board level may be entirely different. Look at what Tim Cruttenden explained in 2006.

Indeed Cruttenden says “entrepreneurs” too, but if we remember that Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia had a lot of managers more than entrepreneurs then, we might have obtained another measure of what makes a good VC…

Silicon Valley, 20 years ago

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Twenty years ago, I entered the VC and startup world. What an anniversary! It was fun and exciting. I would have forgotten it if I did not have a lunch two days ago with people from Logitech. When we talked about Logitech offices in Silicon Valley, I told them I had a document from Businessweek which showed that Logitech was considered as Stanford’s Progeny.

I had to find that document and it was fascinating to go through this 50+ page special issue of Businessweek dated August 18, 1997 and entitled: Silicon Valley, The People, the Deals, the Culture, The Future – How it really works. So let me go through it again.

First the cover. This is a nice little quizz. How many people do you recognize? The answer is at the end of the post.

Second, the table of content. It could be the same today. So things have not changed so much. For example, the migrant factor; the craziness of the area, because of cost, stress; and the invisibility of women, this “subtle sexism every day”.

Third, the recurrent question of why the efforts to duplicate Silicon Valley have all failed…

There are the classical arguments: local governments offer tax incentives or small investments but have no hand in inventing or commercializing technology. And there is an interesting piece: Even private efforts to clone the Valley have fallen flat. Terman, the father of Silicon Valley, was hired in the 1960s to recreate the magic in New Jersey and Texas. He focused on establishing strong research institutions, like Stanford, that could provide a petri dish for bright ideas. But Terman was hired by large organizations, including Bell Labs and Texas Instruments Inc., and few company men were willing to chance a startup. ‘He failed, in part, because he overestimated the importance of academia and in part because he was hired by large companies with no entrepreneurial traditions.’

Finally, what are the lessons learnt? Well known and still valid today…

If you want the pdf, just ask me. This would be a private gift. Whereas putting the full document onlien would be copyrigth infrigement…

Answer to the quizz: A dozen of the Valley’s brightest stars: (top row, left to right) Larry Ellison, Oracle; Marc Andreessen, Netscape; Andy Grove, Intel; Al Shugart, Seagate Technology; Gordon Moore, Intel; John Chambers, Cisco Systems (bottom row, left to right) Steve Jobs, Apple Computer, Pixar; Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems; John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Larry Sonsini, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati; Lew Platt, Hewlett-Packard; Jim Clark, Netscape.

The top US and European (former) start-ups in 2017

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Since I published my book in 2007, I have regularly been doing the exercise of comparing the largest US (former) start-ups and their European counterparts. You can look at my data in 2016 in The top US and European (former) start-ups in 2016. Here are my update lists:

Things have not changed that much. Yahoo is out. Rovio is in…

Is Switzerland a Startup Nation?

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This is the question I was asked to answer at the EPFL Forum today. Well it was even “Is Switzerland the Startup Nation?” I did not answer the question but tried to provide food for thought and I invite you to look at the slides below.

Now that you may have read them, I will add two points I did not mention in my talk:

First Swiss newspaper Le Temps analyzed the issue: Are we, too, a start-up nation from the point of view of the Israelis? ‘I have a message for Switzerland, Dov Moran announces: you do not have enemies and so you do not have to spend 20% of your GDP on your protection. If you’re less entrepreneurial than us, it’s not that bad.’

Then again Orson Welles about creativity and war… “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” in The Third Man, said by Holly Martins to Harry Lime…

Just food for thought.

Rovio (Angry Birds) is going public

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Rovio, the Finnish start-up creator of the famous Angry Birds game, will fly to the Helsinki Stock Exchange next week. Apparently it should be a success as the offer is oversubscribed and has just been closed despite the recent challenges the start-up had to face, as the next figure shows.

I will not comment more but just add my usual capitalization table.