Author Archives: Hervé Lebret

Homo Deus : a Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari (Part 1 – the Past)

I wrote here how much I enjoyed reading Sapiens. Harari’s new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, is just as good.

In Death Is Optional, the exchange between Daniel Kahneman and the author, which summarizes many of Harari’s most original ideas, here is one of the most interesting ones – in relationship to start-ups: “in terms of history, the events in Middle East, of ISIS and all of that, is just a speed bump on history’s highway. The Middle East is not very important. Silicon Valley is much more important. It’s the world of the 21st century … I’m not speaking only about technology.” One may not like it, but it is interesting.

As usual, a few extracts:
“Most studies cite tool production and intelligence as particulararly important for the ascent of humankind. […] Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or wolf, but because Homo Sapiens is the only species on earth capable of co-operating flexibly in large numbers.” [Pages 130-1]

“Animals such as wolves and chimpanzees live in a dual reality. On the one hand, they are familiar with objective entities outside them, such as trees, rocks and rivers. On the other hand, they are aware of subjective experiences within them, such as fear, joy and desire. Sapiens, in contrast, live in triple-layered reality. In addition to trees, rivers, fears and desires, the Sapiens world also contains stories about money, gods, nations and corporations. As history unfolded, the impact of gods, nations and corporations grew at the expense of rivers, fears and desires. There are still many rivers in the world, and people are still motivated by their fears and wishes, but Jesus Christ, the French Republic and Apple Inc. have dammed and harnessed the rivers, and have learned to shape our deepest anxieties and yearnings.” [Page 156]

If we invest money in research, then scientific breakthroughs will accelerate technological progress. New technologies will fuel economic growth, and a growing economy could dedicate even more money to research. With each passing decade we will enjoy more food, faster vehicles and better medicines. One day our knowledge will be so vast and our technology so advanced that we could distill the elixir of eternal youth, the elixir of true happiness, and any other drug we might possibly desire – and no god will stop us. […] Modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid of meaning. [Page 201]

Interesting comparison between the Scientific revolution, where Knowledge = Empirical Data X Mathematics, and the Humanist revolution led by Knowledge = Experiences X Sensitivity. In medieval Europe, Knowledge = Scriptures X Logic. [Pages 235-7]


Humanist revolution according to Harari [Pages 232-3]

Harari is sometimes too long in the development of his ideas, but it is worth following him. On pages 247-76, he explains how humanism is not a coherent view of the world. Three schisms have occurred: liberalism (where liberty is the most important value), socialism (where equality is first) and evolutionary humanism (where conflict is the raw material pushing evolution forward).

“By 1970 the world contained 130 independent countries, but only thirty of these were liberal. […] And then everything changed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag. […] As of 2016, there is no serious alternative to the liberal package. […] China is the most promising ground for the new techno-religions emerging from Silicon Valley. […] God is dead. […] Religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked.” [Pages 264-8]

“Numbers alone don’t count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators. […] In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdallah, […] meanwhile in 1875, Dayananda Saraswati in India, […] Pope Pius IX, in Europe […] or thirty years before, Hong Xiuquan […] Hundreds of millions clung to their religious dogmas. […] Hong led the deadliest war of the nineteenth century, the Taiping Rebellion. From 1850 to 1864, at least 20 million people lost their lives.” [Pages 270-1]

“Most societies failed to understand what was happening, and they therefore missed the train of progress”. [Page 273] Ask yourself what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of the twentieth century? That’s a difficult question […] antibiotics, […] computers, […] feminism. […] What did religions bring? This is a difficult question too because there is so little to choose from. [Page 275]

And as a conclusion of chapter 7: “Since humanism has long sanctified the life, the emotions and the desires of human beings, it’s hardly surprising that a humanist civilisation will want to maximize human lifespans, human happiness and human power.” [Page 277]

What is the equity structure of Uber and Airbnb?

What is the equity structure of Uber and Airbnb? Unfortunately, this is a question only the shareholders in the two start-ups can know. I have nearly no clue. But over the week-end I had a quick look at how much these unicorns have raised and how this impacted the founders. If you read this blog from time to time, you probably know I do this exercise regularly. I have a databasis of more than 350 examples, and I will update it soon with 401 companies, including these two ones. Here is the result of my “quick and dirty” analysis.


Airbnb cap. table – A speculative exercise with very little information available


Uber cap. table – A speculative exercise with very little information available

A few additional remarks:
– the three founders of Airbnb were 27, 27 and 25-year old at the date of foundation. Whereas for Uber, they were 32 and 34;
– as you may see, I do not have any information about other common shareholders, neither about stock option plans. More information will be released when/if the companies file to go public…
– the amounts raised are just amazing but the founders relatively undiluted;
– finally, Uber did a stock split so the huge price per share would be divided by around 40 whereas the real number of shares is multiplied by the same amount.

Comments welcome!

PS: for some unknown reason, I had some trouble with Slideshare. So here is my updated document on Scribd…

Equity Structure in 401+ Start-ups by Herve Lebret on Scribd

Research Exploitation according to Jacques Lewiner

The excellent Paris Innovation Review (formerly known as the ParisTech review) just published an interview of Jacques Lewiner (for the ones not knowing him, you may want to have a look at Jacques Lewiner about Innovation. This new article is entitled Research exploitation: catching up at a quick pace!

It begins with:“Academic research is not only a driver of scientific progress. It is a means to change the world. Many discoveries, including in areas related to basic research, can lead to new processes, products or services.”

Lewiner then explains the complexity of a successful exploitation and biases related to it. “The first [bias] is that, when we think about exploitation, we stick to patents. […] But sticking to patents means ignoring the essential, i.e. the entrepreneurial aspect of exploitation. […] Hence the importance of the entrepreneurial aspect: encouraging researchers to found startups and develop by themselves the economic potential of their discovery. The second bias comes [with …] a strong reluctance to admit that a researcher can make money, or even a fortune. […] A researcher’s brain is government property!”

Then Lewiner adresses the topic of licensing – More about it in How much Equity Universities take in Start-ups from IP Licensing? So here is what he says: “Nothing prevents the institution from taking shares in the company. 5% of shares, for example, is a reasonable figure, close to what most dynamic ecosystems offer. […] Holding golden shares would be equally counterproductive. […] In short, we need a whole new culture of investment.”

Lewiner indeed insists on an adequate culture: “Speed is a real challenge and on this sense, a well-equipped institution with some experience and good contacts […] can offer a real added value. Role models can also play an incentive role for researchers. […] All these ingredients of the “startup culture” require transmission.”

In the end, I only disagree with his final comment: “I dream of the day when French doctoral students will answer to the question of what they will do after their thesis with the same mindset as their counterparts in Stanford or Harvard: ‘I’m still trying to figure out in which of my thesis supervisor’s startups I want to work with.’ ” I think Lewiner is wrong. Ideally, they should do their own start-ups, just like they do at Stanford

PS: thanks a lot to the colleague who mentioned this interview to me 🙂

Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is an extraordinary book. Very similar to Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. It may not be directly related to innovation and start-ups, but below are some extracts I found striking. This is a must-read book…


By It is believed that the cover art can or could be obtained from the publisher.
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48907980

“Consider the following quandary: two biologists from the same department, possessing the same professional skills, have both applied for a million-dollar grant to finance their current research projects. Professor Slughorn wants to study a disease that infects the udders of cows, causing a 10 percent decrease in their milk production. Professor Sprout wants to study whether cows suffer mentally when they are separated from their calves. Assuming that the amount of money is limited, and that it is impossible to finance both research projects, which should be funded?

There is no scientific answer to this question. There are only political, economic and religious answers. In today’s world, it is obvious that Slughorn has a better chance of getting the money. Not because udder diseases are scientifically more interesting than bovine mentality, but because the dairy industry which stands to benefit from the research, has more political and economic clout than the animal-rights lobby.

Perhaps in a strict Hindu society, where cows are sacred, or in a society committed to animal rights, Professor Sprout would have a better shot. But as long as she lives in a society that values the commercial potential of milk and the health of its human citizens over the feelings of cows, she’d best write up her research proposal so as to appeal to those assumptions. For example, she might write that ‘Depression leads to a decrease in milk production. IF we understand the mental world of dairy cows, we could develop psychiatric medication that will improve their mood, thus raising milk production by up to 10 percent. I estimate that there is a global market of $250 million for bovine psychiatric medication.’ […] In short, scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology.” [Pages 304-305]

So how science developed in apparently useless fields?

“The key factor was that the plant-seeking botanist and the colony-seeking naval officer shared a similar mindset. Both scientist and conqueror began by admitting ignorance – they both said ‘I don’t know what’s out there.’ They both felt compelled to go out and make new discoveries. And they both hoped the new knowledge thus acquired would make them master the world.

European imperialism was entirely unlike all other imperial projects in history. Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilized and spread their views of the world. […] European imperialists set out distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along new territories.” [Page 317]

Ignoramus

[Page 279] “Modern science differs (mention Steve Weinberg here?) from all previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways:
a. The willingness to admit ignorance. Modern science is based on the Latin injunction Ignoramus – ‘we don’t know’. It assumes that we don’t know everything. Even more critically, it assumes that the things we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge. No concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge.
b. The centrality of observation and mathematics. Having admitted ignorance, modern science aims to obtain new knowledge. It does so by gathering observations and then using mathematical tools to connect these observations into comprehensive theories.
c. The acquisition of new powers. Modern science is not content with creating theories. It uses these theories in order to acquire new powers, and in particular to develop new technologies.”

[Pages 320-2] “The first modern man was Amerigo Vespucci.” [And not Columbus who contrarily to this lesser-known Italian sailor, was always convinced he had arrived in India and not on a new continent.] […] “Columbus stuck to this error for the rest of his life.” […] “There is poetic justice in the fact that a quarter of the world, and two of its seven continents, are named after a little-known Italian whose sole claim is that he had the courage to say, ‘We don’t know’. The discovery of America was the fundamental event of the Scientific Revolution.”

[This reminds me the day of my PhD oral presentation. A colleague of mine was surprised I dare answering ‘I don’t know’ to a question of a member of the jury. My colleague had also missed the point, I think…]

Chapters 14-16 describe how science, politics and economics are interconnected. They may be less surprising but are as convincing. Here is a disturbing extract: “Conversely, the history of capitalism is unintelligible without taking science into account. […] Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfill these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.” [Page 352]

Unicorns file to go public: Snap & AppDynamics

Two unicorns – start-ups valued at more than $1B – filed to go public these last weeks:
– Snap, Inc. the company famous for its SnapChat service.
– AppDynamics, a probably less famous IT company (but known here in Lausanne for acquiring EPFL spin-off BugBuster).

I publish below their cap. table (to the best of my abilities) as well as their quarterly revenue and loss over 2015 & 2016. (Data are compiled from the S-1 SEC documents)

AppDynamics will not go public as Cisco announced it would acquire AppDynamics for $3.5B. Snap’s IPO remains to be seen. I will let you have a look at data and build your own opinion. On the profit & loss data, I am still surprised to see companies filing to go public with losses which remain high, abd without a clear decrease. Of course, their revenue growth is impressive!

The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig

When I read that Nassim Nicholas Taleb said this is “one of the most important management books of all time”, I was intrigued. Usually I do not like general business books. But here, not only is it a great book, but fun to read!

What is the halo effect? A tendency to make inferences about specific traits on the basis of a general impression [Page 50].

The author has a major question: Is management a science? Pages 12-17 cover that sensitive topic: “In other fields, from medicine to chemistry to aeronautical engineering, knowledge seems to march ahead relentlessly. What do these fields have in common? In a word, these fields move forward thanks to a form of inquiry we call science. Richard Feynman once defined science as “a method for trying to answer questions which can be put into the form: If I do this, what will happen?” Science isn’t about beauty or truth or justice or wisdom or ethics. It’s eminently practical. It asks, If I do something over here, what will happen over there? If I apply this much force, or that much heat, or if I mix these chemicals, what will happen? By this definition, What leads to sustained profitable growth? is a scientific question. It asks, If a company does this or that, what will happen to its revenues or profits or share price?” [Page 12]

“Our inability to capture the full complexity of the business world through scientific experiments has provided fodder for some critics of business schools. Management gurus Warren Bennis and James O’Toole, in 2005 Harvard Business Review article, criticized business schools for their reliance on the scientific method. They wrote: “This scientific model is predicated on the faulty assumption that business is an academic discipline like chemistry or geology when, in fact, business is a profession and business schools are professional schools – or should be”. The notion seems to be that since business will never be understood with the precision of the natural sciences, it’s best understood as a sort of humanity, a realm where the logic of scientific inquiry doesn’t apply. Well, yes and no.” [Page 14]

Rozenzweig concludes this 1st chapter with a beautiful story (page 16), again from Richard Feynman: In the South Seas, there is a cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas – he’s the controller. And they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land. He called that last section Science, Pseudoscience and Coconut Headsets.

Storytelling and science

His criticism in chapter 6 of famous bestsellers In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman [page 83] and then of Built to Last by Collins and Porras [page 94] are particularly striking. Stories and science are different and the author explains many delusions created by approximate science:
#1: The Hallo Effect
#2: The delusion of Correlation and Causality
#3: The Delusion of Single Explanations
#4: The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots
#5: The Delusion of Rigorous Research
#6: The Delusion of Lasting Success
#7: The Delusion of Absolute Performance
#8: The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick
#9: The Delusion of Organizational Physics.
(if you are too lazy to read this great book, have at least a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Halo_Effect_(business_book))

Rosenzweig tries to explain the complexity of measuring company performance. What are the key elements that managers should take into account for excellence? And Rosenzweig shows that storytelling has been as important as research in that quest. He further claims that authors of bestsellers such as In Search of Excellence, Built to Last or From Good to Great who claim their results were based on research, indeed were more excellent story tellers than rigorous researchers.
“It’s not that the important elements are not right. In Search of Excellence gives eight best practice: a bias for action; staying close to the customer; autonomy and entrepreneurship; productivity through people; hands-on, value-driven; stick to the knitting; simple form, lean staff; and simultaneous loose-tight properties.” [Page 85]

“Whereas in Built to Last, Collins and Porras give their 5 timeless principles: having a strong core ideology; building a strong corporate culture; setting audacious goals; developing and promoting people; creating a spirit of experimentation and risk-taking; driving for excellence”. [Page 96]

“Several researchers have studied the rate at which company performance changes over time. Pankaj Ghemawat at Harvard Business School examined the return on investments (ROI) of a sample of 692 American companies over a ten-year period from 1971 to 1980. He put together one group of top performers, with an average ROI of 39 percent, and one group of low performers, with an average ROI of just 3 percent. Then he tracked the two groups over time. What would happen to their ROIS? Would the gap persist, would it grow, or would it diminish? After nine years, both groups converged together toward the middle, the top performers falling from 39 percent to 21 percent and the low performers rising from 3 percent to 18 percent.” [Page 104]

“These studies, and others like them, all point to the basic nature of competition in a market economy. Competitive advantage is hard to sustain. Sure, if you want to, you can look back over seventy years of business history and pick out a handful of companies that have endured, but that’s selection based on outcomes.” [Page 105]

“Interviews with managers, asking them to look back over the ten-year period and recount their experiences (…) these sort of retrospective interviews are likely to be full of halos, as people take cues from performance and make attributions accordingly.” [Page 108]

Again Rosenzwieg has nothing against interviews, he just warns the reader that they have to be meticulously prepared to avoid any bias and answers based on outcomes.
“Another famous study, the Evergreen project, identified eight practices: strategy; execution; culture; structure; talent; leadership; innovation; and mergers and partnerships (Page 110). Yet once we see that performance is relative, it becomes obvious that companies can never achieve success simply by following a given set of steps, no matter how well intended; their success will always be affected by what rivals do” [Page 116].

“Perhaps the most interesting factor in Big Winners and Big Losers is mentioned as a brief aside but not examined closely: Marcus points out that large companies show up more frequently among the Big Losers, while almost all the Big Winners are small or midsize companies. This observation ought to spark one’s curiosity, because large companies got that way in the first place by doing things well – they didn’t grow by being Losers – yet something seemed to prevent them from maintaining that high performance. Extremer performance, for better and for worse, is more common among small companies”. [Page 132]

But a 10 percent difference in performance doesn’t say anything about what will happen at my company – the impact could be more or less or nothing at all. There’s no guarantee, no promise that inspires me to take action. Books, which provide simple and definitive advice and studies of organizational performance, stand in two very different worlds. The first world speaks to practicing managers and rewards speculations about how to improve performance. The second world demands and rewards adherence to rigorous standards of scholarship. Here science is paramount, storytelling less so. The result is a schizophrenic tour de force in which the demands of the roles of the consultant and teacher are disassociated form the demands of the researcher”. [Page 135]

“According to the Economist, Tom Peters can charge corporate clients up to $85,000 for a single appearance, and Jim Collins commands a fee of $150,000. There’s a lucrative market for spinning stories of corporate success. Will anyone hire (a researcher) at $85,000 or $150,000 a pop to talk about a statistically significant 4 percent difference in performance? Somehow it seems doubtful [page 136].

The test of a good story is not whether it is entirely, fully, scientifically accurate – by definition it won’t be. Rather, the test of a good story is whether it leads us toward valuable insights, if it is inspires towards helpful action, at least most of the time. [Page 137]

Strategy and execution

“Here’s how I like to think about company performance. According to Michael Porter of Harvard Business School, company performance is driven by two things: Strategy and execution.” [Page 144]

But both are full of uncertainties: “Strategy always involves risk because we don’t know for sure how our choices will turn out. […] A first reason has to do with customers. […] Sam Philips, the legendary Sun records producer, once cautioned, “Anytime we think you know what the public’s going to want that’s when you know you’re looking at a damn fool when you’re looking in the mirror”. Market reaction is always uncertain, and smart strategists know it. [Page 146]

“A second source of risk has to do with competitors. […] An entire branch of economics, game theory, has grown up around a simple form of competitive intelligence. […] A third source of risk comes from technological change. […] In his groundbreaking research Clayton Christensens at Harvard Business School showed that in a wide range of industries, from earth-moving equipment to disk drives to steel, successful companies were repeatedly dislodged by new technologies. [Page 147]

Jim Collins expressed surprised that [his] eleven Great companies came from ordinary, unspectacular industries. […] I suspect a different interpretation. These industries can be described as dowdy, but a better word might be stable. They were less subject to radical changes in technology, were less susceptible to shifts in customer demand, and may have had less intense competition. [Page 147]

As James March of Stanford and Zur Shapira of New York University explained, “Posthoc reconstruction permits history to be told in such a way that “chance”, either in the sense of genuinely probabilistic phenomena or in the senses of unexplained variation, is minimized as an explanation.” But chance does play a role, and the difference between a brilliant visionary and a foolish gambler is usually inferred after the fact, an attribution based on outcomes. [Page 150]

There are fewer unknowns […], yet execution still involves a number of uncertainties. [Page 151] And that brings us to the best answer I can provide to the question, What leads to high performance? If we set the usual suspects of leadership and culture and focus and so on – which are perhaps causes of performance – we’re left with two broad categories: strategic choice and execution. The former is inherently risky since it’s based on our best guesses about customers, about competitors, and technology, as well as about our internal capabilities. The latter is uncertain because best practices that work well on one company may not have the same effect in another. […] Wise managers know that business is about finding ways to improve the odds of success – but never imagine that success is certain. If a company makes strategic choices which are shrewd, works hard to operate effectively, and is favored by Lady Luck, it may put some distance between itself and its rivals, at least for a time. But even those profits will tend to erode over time. [Page 156]

The answer to the question what really works? is simple: Nothing really works. At least not all the time. […] So what can be done? A first step is to set aside the delusions that color so much of our thinking about business performance. To accept that few companies achieve lasting success. To admit that the margin between success and failure is often very narrow, and never quite as distinct or as enduring as it appears at a distance. And finally, to acknowledge that luck often plays a role in company success. [Page 158]

Rosenzweig finishes his book with examples of bold decisions from leaders at Goldman Sachs, Intel, BP, Logitech. Entrepreneurship inherently involves risks, but not doing anything would be much riskier.

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

The Industries of the Future is not a very good book. Probably because it tries to talk about the future and nobody knows about it. But it has some merits that I will describe in the end…

Even worse, I think it is not as precise an analysis as is The Innovation Illusion by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel. Why do I claim such a thing? Let me just mention one example. To show the potential of robots in the future, Ross reminds us Foxconn claim in 2011 that it would have installed one million robots in by 2015. (See for example Foxconn Will Replace Workers With 1 Million Robots in 3 Years). Ross even adds that Foxconn had already installed 300’000 robots. Erixon and Weigel have different views and explain that Foxconn had not even installed 50’000 robots in 2015. So who is right? I did some search and all media mentions 40’000 robots only in 2016… (see Foxconn reaches 40,000 robots of original 1 million robot automation goal). When you want to talk about the future, you need to be precise about the present…

Now his chapter The Geography of Future Markets provides interesting food for thought. Silicon Valley has been the center of high-tech innovation for nearly 50 years. Many regions have tried to copy it, without much success. But many regions have domain expertise such as Boston for biotech, Israel for security, Japan/SouthKorea/Germany for robotics, etc. If these regions leverage the future innovations, they will continue to be leaders. If not, “twentysomething” nerds without any domain expertise but with a lot entrepreneurial drive and technical know-how will take the lead. Ross provides examples but it is sufficient to look at what Elon Musk did to the payment industry (PayPal), automotive industry (Tesla) and aerospace industry (SpaceX). Silicon Valley has extensive experience in “scale-ups” and is not losing any of it…

The State of the European Tech

The recently published The State of the European Tech, co-sponsored by Atomico and Slush is an extremley interesting analysis of the European tech start-up and VC scene. it is a rather long 118-slide document but most (not all) pages provide food for thought.

Here are a couple of comments, in the page order:

– The introduction is too optimistic (slides 5-7). I doubt their title: the future is being invented in Europe. But it has always been Atomico’s founder vision: see Europe and Start-ups : should we worry? Or is there hope? The future will tell us… One interesting point though: London, Berlin and Paris are the 3 hubs main European hubs and Paris was probably underestimated (in the past).

– The entrepreneurial mindset is continuously improving (slides 15-16). Repeat entrepreneurs are more numerous (slide 18). And they mention their importance not so much as future successful entrepreneurs (you may know my doubts – check Serial entrepreneurs: are they better?) but because of the experience and network they bring.

– I love slide 21 with EPFL #4 world wide in Computer Science (though I hate these rankings!). Switzerland is clearly on the map together with the UK. I am honestly less convinced about the impact of business schools in tech (slide 22). Talent exists in Europe but may not be available for tech (slide 23).

– Again the three top hubs are obvious: together London, Paris and Berlin outnumber Silicon Valley. But the ranking from #4 to #20 is mostly linked to city size, not so much any unique positioning. Tech is creating jobs faster than other industries (slide 26). Never too late! But again Europe is fragmented with 153 identified tech hubs (slide 34)

Migrants (slides 27-29). Again the UK is #1. France and Germany follow. And Switzerland is well-ranked (except for non-Europeans).

– Local entrepreneurs want to stay home (slide 37): 60% prefer home to another place in Euope (17%) or Silicon Valley (12%), even if 25% of founders incorporated outside of their home country (slide 38). Clearly Europe exists! Even if slide 39 shows more local migrations inside Europe, with the exception of London and Berlin again and the links between hubs are weak (slide 41)

– The slides about venture capital are the most surprising. Slide 46 shows that the European investments have jumped from less than $5B before 2013 to $13B in 2015-16. (In comparison the US is about $30B). And the growth is consistent from early eseed ($0-2M) to early stage ($2-5M) and later stage ($10-50+M). I assemble here their data about the UK, Germany, France and Switzerland (slides 50-52). A new generation of investors is confirmed, those who were entrepreneurs 1st (slide 60). The early such actors were Atomico, Liautaud/Balderton, Niel/Kima. But many emerge. A new generation of funds also emerge (slide 64), and yes, US funds invest in Europe (slide 65)

atomico_european_vc

– Their section about deep tech is less convincing (to me). Probably I did not fully understand what they meant by that and why it would be so special. Slides 78-9 about US tech giants coming to Europe and about their acquisitions in Europe is worth checking though.

– I was not convinced either about the growing awareness of European corporations of the importance of tech. Their investments and acquisitions are still small compared to their US counterparts (slides 84-86). But slide 83 is the confirmation of a scary situation. This is another illustration of the Darwinian and Lamarckian innovation. Look at next figure.

atomico_european_giants

– The section about scale-ups and exits (slides 89-101) could have been called unicorns & IPOs. I see bubbles and low value creations. Not good enough and not enough tech…

– Finally the lside about perceived risks is worth spending some time. they classify them as Business issues (40%); Economic issues (30%); European issues (22%); International issues (8%). But somehow their classification is subjective. For example if you combine risk aversion (4%), fear (2%), ambition (2%), that is 8%. And talent (4%), innovation (3%) and education (2%) would be another 9%. These elements which I consider as cultural could be considered as quite high…

All these notes were taken while reading so don’t see them as a deep analysis and you should build your own views about this really interesting analysis.

The Nobel Prize for Thomas Piketty?

I have already said here how much I liked Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (see Has the world gone crazy? Maybe…). In finally ending my reading of the French edition of this 970-page book, I could not help thinking that the author would soon have the Nobel Prize in Economics, even though I have no competence to judge.

capital_in_the_twenty-first_century_front_cover

When reading his conclusion, I found in the author’s words one of the reasons for my respect regarding this work: “Let us repeat it: the sources gathered in this book are more extensive than those of the previous authors, but they are imperfect and incomplete. All the conclusions I have reached are inherently fragile and deserve to be challenged and debated. Research in social science is not intended to produce ready-made mathematical certainties and to substitute for public, democratic and contradictory debate” [Page 941].

He adds further on: “I see no other place for the economy but as a sub-discipline of the social sciences. […] I do not much like the expression “economic science”, which seems to me to be terribly arrogant and which could lead one to believe that the economy would have reached a higher scientific specificity, distinct from other social sciences. […] One can, for example, spend a great deal of time demonstrating the indisputable existence of a pure and true causality, by forgetting in passing that the question treated is sometimes of limited interest.” [Page 945-7].

Piketty also summarizes his work in a few lines [Page 942]:

“The general lesson of my inquiry is that the dynamic evolution of a market economy and of private property, left to itself, contains within it important convergent forces, linked in particular to the dissemination of knowledge and qualifications, but also powerful forces of divergence, potentially threatening for our democratic societies and the values ​​of social justice on which they are based.

The main destabilizing force is related to the fact that the private rate of return on capital r can be strongly and permanently higher than the growth rate of income and output. The inequality r > g implies that the heritages of the past recapitalize faster than the rate of increase of production and wages. […] The entrepreneur tends inevitably to become an annuitant. […] The past devours the future.”

And the solution is clear: “The right solution is the progressive annual tax on capital. […] The difficulty is that this solution requires a very high degree of international cooperation and regional political integration” [Pages 943-44].

All is said.

I can not help ending this brief article by recalling a striking example among the multitude of data analyzed:

t12

The digital revolution: stakes and challenges (for Switzerland).

My latest contribution to Enterprise Romande, this time about the digital revolution. Below is my “quick and dirty” translation.

er_digital_switzerland

I have always been suspicious of fashionable expressions and buzzwords (nanotechnologies, Health Valley, etc.) that are often meaningless and refer to societal or political issues without inducing the slightest change. “Digital Revolution” should not have been an exception to my rule. But the stakes ahead are of a completely different nature and a few salutary readings quickly made me change my mind.

Far from home, President Barack Obama has just published in The Economist a text, which must be read absolutely, the Way Ahead [1] and a series of interviews in Wired [2] calling for confidence in technological progress and for supporting the development of artificial intelligence. His optimism and enthusiasm for the future, even moderated by the challenges and stakes ahead, are impressive and his only vision of the world makes him undoubtedly one of the greatest leaders in history.

Closer to us, Angela Merkel and Johann Schneider-Ammann also took the measure of a revolution which Germany and Switzerland will have to take into account despite the solidity of their economy (see [3] for example). The article “Smart Industry 4.0 in Switzerland” by Matthias Kaiserswerth [4] brilliantly describes the Swiss digital landscape, the stakes and the challenges.

The stakes are simple: there is no doubt that all sectors of the economy, from industry to services, will be affected, not to say “disrupted” by the acceleration of digital transformations. So far, only information and communication technologies (ICT) have been impacted. But today all services can be threatened by the “uberization”. And tomorrow the German automotive industry will be challenged by the Googles, Apples and other Teslas of the world, the Swiss watch industry by the connected watch. And the day after tomorrow, perhaps, bank services by blockchain, health services by personalized medicine and even more seriously the world of labor by robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. Without any reaction from us, Europeans, we will become consumers only, then unable to consume due to lack of resources.

The challenges are up to what is at stake. They start with education and I fear that the actors and decision-makers in primary and secondary education have not understood that Word and Excel are not enough to raise awareness about the algorithmic culture. In terms of vocational training, Kaiserswerth estimates that there will be a shortage of over 30,000 digital experts in Switzerland in 2022. Yet ICT represents more than 20,000 jobs in French-speaking Switzerland alone (in fact about as much as Medtech and Biotech together). But except some great success stories (Temenos, Logitech, Swissquote), most jobs are created by large foreign companies (IBM, HP) or service companies. In Zurich, the leader is called Google. For more than 20 years I have been trying, often unsuccessfully, to describe Europe’s innovation gaps by shaking the banner of a shortage of start-ups that have become such giants as the GAFAs.

An awareness of the challenges ahead is welcome as the country has time to adapt. At least if we react now. Much more needs to be done to integrate digital technologies in education and training and to increase the research effort in these new fields, at the risk of lagging behind. But even this will not be enough. The Americans have sufficiently shown that the first digital revolution, far from being solely technological, was also cultural. We must stimulate the desire. Why are there so few computer science students in our universities? Innovation itself has drastically changed. Innovation has deserted the laboratories of large groups to find refuge in the start-up garages. I dream that our alarmed decision makers do not remain as too often attached to short-term messages and invest in education, research and innovation by start-ups to enable the Swiss economy with its large corporations and many SMEs to adapt to a revolution rich in opportunities. Switzerland has the means. Does it have the will?

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21708216-americas-president-writes-us-about-four-crucial-areas-unfinished-business-economic
[2] https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-interview/
[3] https://www.letemps.ch/economie/2016/03/14/ensemble-allemagne-suisse-peuvent-devenir-leaders-economie-numerique-europe
[4] https://www.startup-book.com/2016/07/08/challenges-and-opportunities-of-industry-4-0/