Author Archives: Hervé Lebret

Of Start-ups and Men

Second contribution to the EPFL “start-up of the month”: after venture capital with Aleva, I focus on the team with SWISSto12.

12.03.12 – A killer product is not the only key to success for a young start-up. Even in the high-tech sector, the human-factor can be vital, and the founders of SWISSto12 know just how to use this to their advantage

Emile de Rijk, Alessandro Macor founders of SWISSto12

SWISSto12 is the ideal model of a “starting” start-up company. It has all the essential (and sometimes counterintuitive) ingredients for success. A critical factor for a good start is the trust and transparent dealings between the individuals making up the original team. The two founders, Emile de Rijk and Alessandro Macor, may not have the experience you (wrongly) think they need, but their dedication will move mountains. They have invented a Terahertz Signal Transmission technology and, because this answers hitherto unsolved problems, SWISSto12 had a client even before it was established! An opportunity arose, and the two scientists made the most of it. More importantly, their innovation may open up new markets no-one had even thought of – such is the beauty of high-tech, with all its uncertainties. No need for a business plan at this stage: what matters is having a vision and finding the right people to make up the best possible team – which is the subject of this note.

First of all, I strongly advise not to embark on such an adventure alone. Professor Ansermet of the Laboratory of the Physics of Nanostructured Materials was impressed by the enthusiasm displayed by the two young scientists and provides friendly support. This is an absolute must.

EFPL backed up this support with its Technology Transfer Office, which helped to patent the technology and grant an exclusive licence to SWISSto12. (If I may make a brief digression here, one often sees entrepreneurs frustrated at the difficulty in negotiating IP rights. Although the perception is rather negative here, exceptions [such as the Bose adventure at MIT] should not obscure a much more transparent reality).

This start-up made the most of all the local support mechanisms: coaching at the PSE, Innogrant, VentureKick, CTI, and I probably forget others as the EPFL ecosystem is so efficient – to the point that this may even be dangerous if you rely solely on these support mechanisms.

SWISSto12 also secured an outstanding mentor in Valtronic founder Georges Rochat, who I recently found out has lived in Silicon Valley and knows the environment inside out. He not only contributes his own experience, but also a network and credibility which are key to the start-up’s development.

When the time came to recruit staff, things became tricky. After the exhilarating first few days, the new team realised that some dynamics were incompatible with a start-up’s culture where everyone lends a hand and “reporting structure” is considered a rather rude expression. A painful, but unavoidable decision was made to separate on good terms. In a start-up company, the main reason for failure is the human factor, much more than the technology, product or market.

I shared the idea of this column with Emile de Rijk, who said that you must “play out in the open and be honest with your partners to as to create win-win situations”. SWISSto12 is about to look for investors and the company’s potential should make it possible to realise these ambitions. I spoke of success criteria earlier. Naturally, there is no guarantee of this and entrepreneurship is always a careful balance regardless of a company’s size, and even more so in the case of a start-up. Still, in my opinion the founders’ passion and enthusiasm, combined with their ambition and lots of good sense, have definitely put them on the right track!

The Startup Factories: The rise of accelerator programmes

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The Startup Factories: The rise of accelerator programmes is certainly the best analysis I read on the new trend (the new hype?) in start-up support. “Early evidence suggests they have a positive impact on founders, helping them learn rapidly, create powerful networks and become better entrepreneurs. Although incubators are sometimes stigmatised as providing ‘life support’ to companies, these accelerator programmes are notable for the high quality of both mentors and startup teams they work with and the value they add to companies.” [Page 3]

You may not know what are accelerators, so here is what it is about: a programme that gathers a limited number of project owners with
• An application process that is open to all, yet highly competitive.
• Provision of pre-seed investment, usually in exchange for equity (a few $10k for 5-10%)
• A focus on small teams not individual founders.
• Time-limited support comprising programmed events and intensive mentoring (usually 3 months)
• Cohorts or ‘classes’ of startups rather than individual companies (from 10 at seedcamp to 60 at Y Combinator per class)

In addition, the time-limited element puts pressure on entrepreneurs who also want to look good compared to their peers; a demo day / pitch sessions further pressure entrepreneurs to deliver prototypes and visions. Obviously founders, business angels, VCs and even corporates benefit from this new source of deal flow.

Most famous programmes are Y Combinator, Techstars, Seedcamp and Startupbootcamp.

So why have these programmes emerged. The rationals are the following:
– they provide new solutions to innovation [page 24]: “The problem that accelerators solve for venture capital funds is that they create new deal-flow. A number of investors told us that this was the compelling reason for supporting Seedcamp in London in the early days. There simply weren’t enough young founders and companies having any contact with the world of investment. The venture capital community has an interest in growing the overall number of good companies. If they can attract talented people to think about setting up startups rather than going to work for large organisations, that could be good news for the whole sector.”
– they provide access to quality mentors and investors to founders who receive an early validation from the selection from the accelerator process.
– at least in the web and mobile world, start-ups costs are shrinking,
– again in these worlds, it is easier to reach new customers and there are easier routes to revenues
– the concepts around lean start-ups (Eric Ries, Steve Blank) make product development more iterative thanks to efficient interactions with early adopters.

Now the accelerators are not proven models. They are first too young and second, they have been criticized already for the following reasons [page 32]:
– They only build relatively small companies.
– They divert talent from other high-growth startups.
– Good companies still fail after accelerator programmes.
– They exploit startup founders.
– They attract companies that are already struggling.
– They’re helping to create a bubble.
– They’re just ‘startup schools’.

In conclusion: they are interesting for the connections and filtering they provide. They are also of value for the education element including an open culture. But the business model is not validated and although they make sense for software, web and mobile apps, the model is less clear for other technology segments. If you want to know more, you should read this very good report 🙂

The challenge(s) of innovation

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Entreprise Romande asked me to write a short article about Innovation. It was published on March 2, here is my quick (and dirty) translation

Two famous quotes are worth recalling: in 1899, Charles Duel proposed to close the patent office he headed the U.S. stating that “everything that has to be invented has already been.” Less than a century later, Bill Gates stated with conviction that “a computer did not need the equivalent of more than a memory disk.”If these two predictions show that the difficulties of innovation are linked to the difficulty in predicting the future too far, they are unfortunately only legends! It remains no less true that innovators face many obstacles, the first of them being the permanent uncertainty in which swims the one who wants to offer something new.

The difficulties do not stop at the door of the future. In a famous book, Professor Clayton Christensen explains the dilemma of large companies toward innovation. Christensen uses the term Great and not Large because he speaks of the best managed corporations: by being attentive to their customers, they constantly seek to serve them better by improving the constant changes in the quality of their products and services. In doing so, it is extremely difficult to see coming revolutions, all the more difficult to identify that they often start very humbly, with products of inferior quality and very incomplete. Christensen cites numerous examples, but simply note that Microsoft almost missed the turn to a web that did not generate income, Nokia has missed the market for smart phones and I remind you this famous quote by Henry Ford: “If I had asked consumers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Any smart player quickly learns from those mistakes. Christensen, who has become an icon in innovation, explains that the major players must simply create spin-offs away from customers and development centers. Despite some initial mistakes, Nespresso has become a flagship product of Nestle. Perhaps less known is the fact that Cisco has become a major player in the world of servers thanks to a start-up it had funded in its infancy and then acquired. The lessons were digested; Christensen and other experts today have become popes of innovation with more refined models

The spin-off concept is nowadays obvious, and good news, there is no need for significant resources, at least initially. Experts advocate rapid iterations in constant contact with potential customers, from the start of a project. It was also understood that one must first find customers willing to test visionary products, even promising but incomplete. Adjustments can be made continuously and avoid unnecessary investments in directions that the market would refuse later. Finally, the transition for visionary customers to more conservative customers will require a specific strategy and often a new team for product development. Systematic procedures that would ensure the success of future innovations? Unfortunately not. In a recent interview to the Finnish press, Steve Blank who believed he had developed a scientific theory of innovation said, ” Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development, Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. I’m beginning to suspect this assumption may be wrong. It’s not that the tools are wrong. Where I think we have gone wrong is the belief that anyone can use these tools equally well.” In the same way that word processing has never replaced a writer, a thoughtful innovation process will not guarantee success. Blank added that ” until we truly understand how to teach creativity, their numbers are limited. Not everyone is an artist, after all.”

Now it’s Yelp! IPOs in 2012… and again founders’ age

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IPOs do not seem to stop in 2012. Now it’s Yelp before Facebook! You’ll find below my usual cap. table format. As with many stories, there is no data on one founder. He left Yelp before the IPO, I am always surprised where there is nothing on him in the prospectus…

The Founders and Their Army Russel Simmons (left) and Jeremy Stoppelman, plus a few of the hundreds of thousands of Yelpers who post regularly on their site. Ref: Inc.

More interestingly is statistical data, that I have updated with now 116 companies. You can check founders’ age, years to IPO or VC amounts relatively to fields, geography and times of foundations. I also add % ownership of founders, employees and investors after IPO.

As a reminder, you can have a look at the full data in the attached pdf (or by clicking on the picture),

Click on picture to access full pdf data

Some final graphical illustrations about
– the age of founders relative to year of foundation

– some correlations (or not) between sales, VC amounts, nb of employees.

After the lean startup, the anorexic startup

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You must read The Anorexic Startup. Just because it is a funny tale about start-ups. More precisley author Mike Frankel claims it is a “A Tale of Sex, Drugs, and C++”. You will follow entrepreneur and hero, Dale Schmidt, from Day 37 to Day 155 of his great adventure!! You can either download the 15-page pdf on the author’s site or please him by buying it on Amazon for $1.20!

Following my review of The Lean Startup, the author of The Anorexic Startup contacted me and asked what I thought of his work. I read it, smiled first and then laughed. I love this short story and the 10-20 minutes it takes to read is worth your time. Realistic I am not sure, but certainly close to many true stories. The shortest and probably among the best stories I read on the (high-tech) start-up and entrepreneurship words. Enjoy!

Is venture capital a universal solution?

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Following my post from last Friday, here is a series I have been asked to write for EPFL start-ups. It is logical that it appears also here. This first chronicle is about Aleva, a great EPFL start-up, and it is also abotu venture capital. Here it is.

10.02.12 – Aleva Neurotherapeutics has succeeded in raising 10 million Swiss francs in venture capital. The EPFL start-up has shown that this type of financing is not out of reach for young Swiss companies.

For this initial article in the “start-up of the month” column, it was a “must” to talk about Aleva Neurotherapeutics. Andre Mercanzini, its founder, got his PhD at the Microsystems Laboratory (LMIS4) headed by Prof. Philippe Renaud. What was my motivation? André is a shining example of the enthusiastic and persevering entrepreneur. He obtained an Innogrant in 2008. This grant enables apprentice-entrepreneurs to devote their time to their start-up project for one year. The life of an entrepreneur is not exactly a bed of roses, and as well as enthusiasm you need courage. And you shouldn’t do it alone. By persuading another entrepreneur, Jean-Pierre Rosat, to join the adventure, Andre convinced three venture-capital funds (based in Lausanne, Basel and Zurich) to invest. But it was only in August 2011 that the raising of the 10 million francs became a reality, a full three years after Aleva was founded!

I’m not going to say much about the activity of this start-up. Aleva develops electrodes for neurosurgery and these are implanted in the brains of patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease or severe depression. I am not going to say more about Andre Mercanzini either; he can describe his adventure better than anyone else. On the other hand, I’ve noticed that Andre has already become a role model for other entrepreneurs from EPFL and that he himself had the opportunity to prepare his thesis in a very entrepreneurial laboratory. If you go to the page of LMIS4 mentioned above, you will see that no fewer than 13 start-ups originate from there. Emulation is a key element here.

Risk capital: for start-ups with rapid growth

What matters also to me, beyond the entrepreneurial qualities of the two founders, is to show that venture capital is not an unreachable objective. About 10% of EPFL start-ups have raised such funds. Some entrepreneurs who appeal to institutions in the venture capital area subsequently complain about their conservatism. Others avoid them like the plague, referring to them as “vulture capitalists”. This is open to debate. It’s undeniable that this type of investor is looking for companies with a potential for rapid and global growth, and not all start-ups can fulfill this criteria.

There is now available in the world, in Europe and in Switzerland, much more money than there was 20 years ago, even if there is a lot less than during the “irrational exuberance” period of the Internet bubble. It always has been, and will continue to be, difficult to find money (for any kind of project in fact). However, Aleva, but also Biocartis and TypeSafe (other start-ups from EPFL) have shown that it is possible. Is venture capital a must? I sometimes tend to think so when it concerns high-tech start-ups and I know that I’m sometimes reproached for giving it too much importance. I simply note that a very large number of successful American companies have applied for these funds and that boot-strapped companies are the exception in the USA. In Europe, it’s the opposite!

“In Switzerland, we prefer a small entity that you can control from A to Z”

I would like to finish with a quotation from Daniel Borel, another entrepreneur who studied at EPFL. “The only answer I can suggest is the cultural difference between the United States and Switzerland. When we founded Logitech, as Swiss entrepreneurs, we had to play the internationalization card very early on. The technology was Swiss, but the United States, and later on the world, defined our market, whereas the production quickly became based in Asia. I wouldn’t be at ease with myself if I were to paint a negative picture, because I think that many things evolve and that many good things happen in Switzerland. But it seems to me that in the United States, people are more open. When you obtain funds from venture capitalists, you automatically accept an external shareholder who helps you manage your company, but who can also sack you. In Switzerland, this vision is not so widely accepted: we prefer a small entity that can be controlled from A to Z, rather than a big undertaking that you can only control at 10%, which can be a limiting element.”

You have to go global, and right from the start

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I do not make the front page so often so it was fun to be on the EPFL one this morning. Forgetting about ego, I talked about my usual obsession, lack of growth of European start-ups. You may read the interview by clicking on the picture or reading it below.

More seriously maybe, you can read a similar analysis by Oseo, the French innovation agency which published “A look at 10 years of creation of innovative companies in France”. the study is in French and looked at 5’500 start-ups created between 1998 and 2007.

What the study says is that 85% of the company are alive after 5 years [against 50% in the USA; I already addressed the topic in Survival or failure – which success?], they have less than 10 employees, and the one important reason of this situation is the difficulty in building relational networks. Nothing new probably and nothing new in the interview below… except maybe that half of the French start-ups have an international strategy right from teh start and 30% have a foreign-only market!

“You have to go global, and right from the start.”

10.02.12 – How do you go about setting up a business? Hervé Lebret, start-up specialist and head of the Innogrant program at EPFL, answers a few questions. “When launching a start-up, you must think globally right from the start”, says Hervé Lebret, head of the Innogrant program, a support tool for entrepreneurs coming from academia. He believes that both the Swiss and Europeans hesitate too much when creating start-ups. As the person responsible for writing a monthly column dedicated to start-ups on the new EPFL website, starting next Monday, he was more than happy to be interviewed.

Does the current economic situation make it harder to find funding?
This may come as a surprise, but I don’t think that things have really changed. It’s hard to find capital, as it has always been, but not impossible. It depends on the business area concerned, but I would even go so far as to say that there is more capital now than there was 15 years ago. Businesses such as Scala or Aleva, with origins in EPFL labs, have raised significant sums from venture capitalists in the last few years, just as Aïmago, Lemoptix or Attolight which secured 1 to 2 million francs from Business Angels.

Are some areas more favorable than others?
It makes it easier if the know-how is present locally, as is the case here with biomeds or nanotechnologies. Cleantech businesses are starting to lose the favor which they enjoyed until recently. But I’m convinced that ideas can come out of anywhere and get a good reception, as long as their communication is efficient. Incidentally, we shouldn’t pay so much attention to the needs of the market. These don’t suffice to predict which start-up will be the next success-story. Promising areas have needs, but no immediate solutions, and when the start-ups enter the market the first needs have often already evolved and are moving in another direction.

How can one ensure a good launch for their start-up?
Only one start-up out of ten succeeds in raising venture capital like Aleva or Biocartis, and grows to a size of 50 to 100 employees. Then out of these, 10 percent will enjoy success over ten years, like Endoart or Swissquote, which employs over 400 people. The main goal should not be survival. On the contrary, these start-ups sometimes last too long. Some 90 percent of them are still there five years on, but they haven’t grown. In the United States there is a higher rate of renewal: only 50 percent of start-ups are still in existence after this same five-year-period. The problem lies in the conservative stance of Europeans, who are wary of quick growth. I think we should bring students’ attention to this aspect very early, starting in high school. You cannot just turn yourself into a businessperson. We need to encourage children and young people to explore and stop stigmatizing failure, which we still do now in Switzerland. We plan to show a fascinating documentary soon on the topic of students who are eager and interested in creating businesses – it’s called Something Ventured.

How do you carve out a place for yourself?
It’s fairly easy, if you have a good idea, to obtain up to 500,000 francs from public funds or philanthropic organizations, which allows the business to survive one or two years. These contacts also provide free marketing, which can in turn help to find initial business angels and make an initial million francs. The limits come from the young businessperson’s excessive humility, from their self-limitations. In order to succeed, you must be a salesman and somewhat extrovert, or team up with someone who is. Network is essential in effective positioning of the company.

How important are start-ups for the economic fabric of Switzerland?
Some forty start-ups are created each year in the Canton of Vaud, fifteen of which come from the academic world. They play an important role in the future of the Canton, of Switzerland and even Europe. Logitech or Swissquote, for instance, have created many jobs. However, Swiss start-ups in general struggle to grow beyond five or six employees. The biggest problem is well known: entrepreneurs lack risk-taking instincts and therefore struggle to grow their businesses. They prefer to do it in stages. In the United States an “all or nothing” policy prevails, and results in a higher success rate. Facebook, which has just declared its entry on the stock exchange, already employs 3000 people. Individuals who have good ideas go straight ahead and are not afraid of failure. They aim directly for global markets. The biggest mistake is to aim first and foremost for the Swiss market. One should aim for the world market straight away by adopting a global perspective and not being afraid of passing off as arrogant is essential.

Author: Cécilia Carron – Source: EPFL Mediacom

Something Ventured: a great movie

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I just watched Something Ventured and I loved it. Loved it so much I plan to have it shown to as many EPFL students as possible in the spring! It is a movie about passion, enthusiasm, energy, changing the world and yes… about money. When asked about their hope about the movie, producers Molly Davis Paul Holland said: Our high hope for this film is that every student that wants to be an entrepreneur—at every level, high school, business school, on corporate campuses—sees it. We want to see more young people fall in love with entrepreneurship… And if we have a quieter, more serious goal, it’s that I want policymakers to look at this and say ‘What can we do to make it easier, not harder, for people in this country to start those kinds of businesses?’

I would have said I hope that every student — at every level — sees it. And the producers added we were trying to explain our vision for the movie and said, ‘What we are envisioning is a movie like Reds [Warren Beatty’s 1981 film about the original Bolsheviks], where you go back in time to talk about an exciting period — in that case 1917 Russia — and ask people in the present day what it was like back then. Dan said ‘Ok, so you want to make Reds but without the Communists.’ That is ultimately what came about: A really beautiful dialogue with really interesting men and the people they financed.

“A Film About Capitalism, and (Surprise) It’s a Love Story.”

This is the title of another article about the movie, where the journalist says “moviegoers can see what might be the rarest bird in the documentary world: a genuine love story about capitalism.” Somewhere else, the moviemaker, Dayna Goldfine explains: “I think what compelled us to take this one on, even though it is a positive view of business, was, one, it’s a chance to do this kind of alternative view. But also, what these guys were doing – both the entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists – was creating real products. So much of what has come down in terms of the financial tragedy of the last few years has been caused by the investment bankers –people who were really just creating financial instruments, as opposed to changing the world with technology by creating or funding an Apple Computer, or a Cisco Systems, or a Genentech”. Co-moviemaker Dan Geller adds: “I wouldn’t say that money was incidental – money was important – but the overwhelming enthusiasm was for taking these brilliant ideas and these inchoate technologies and making something earth-shattering with them. That’s the energy, I think, that comes through in these stories.”

Yes it is a movie about capitalism, about business. But it is also a movie about enthusiasm, happiness, failure also. It begins in 1957 with Fairchild and Arthur Rock. It could have begun with French expatriate Georges Doriot. A professor at Harvard who supposedly taught manufacturing (in fact it was about how many glasses to drink at a cocktail party and how to read newspapers – go to obituaries), Doriot did not create venture capital with ARD (even if he funded Digital Equipment – DEC) – Rock created the term later, but Doriot inspired most of the heroes of the movie: Tom Perkins, Bill Draper, Pitch Johnson, Dick Kramlich. And these guys funded Intel, Atari, Apple, Tandem, Genentech, Cisco. (The movie tells stories from the 60s to the 80s, but Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook could have been added). Indeed with the movie, the Social Network, it’s the best movie I have seen about high-tech entrepreneurship. What I had nearly forgotten in The Social Network is the closed Boston society (Zuckerberg desperate efforts to enter high-end social clubs). Here also, the Wild West explains its success through openness and risk taking.

And the authors did not cheat. It is also about painful memories, how Powerpoint ended up in Microsoft hands, maybe because the entrepreneur had found it too tough before or how one of the rare women in this world, Sandy Lerner, the co-founder of Cisco, may have not forgiven her firing from the company she had created: “you gotta understand the game that you’re in. […] Look, there wasn’t a box for me.” So yes, it is also about failures, “living deads”, but there is a “feel good” attitude, funny moments, such as when Valentine visiting the Atari factory does not recognize the cigarette brands he smokes!! Or when Gordon Moore (the famous Moore law) remembers that Intel went public the same day as PlayBoy.

So if you do not know much (or even if you do know a lot) about Fairchild, Intel, Atari, Tandem, Genentech, Apple, Cisco, and even if you do not care about entrepreneurship, run and watch Something Ventured. Hopefully you will care!

The Dark Side of Innovation

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If you read the Englsih version of my blog, you probably do not know the excellent, brilliant Philippe Meyer and his Chronicles on France Culture. He is usually funny, but when he talked last Friday about innovation (which does not happen often), it was tough to smile. You can listen to his mp3 file here.

Philippe Meyer is in fact refering to an article from the New York Times: How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work. Meyer mentions the famous Titan Diner, where President Obama invited some of the Silicon Valley personalities. He talks about the price we pay to have our electronic gadgets, the price paid by the Chinese workers at Foxconn or by the American middle-class and its high level of unemployment.

I do not have any (good) answer to the question. But it is sometimes good to think about the dark side of innovation and economy in general. I am currently reading a biography of Schumpeter. Already, more than a hundred years ago, the problem was addressed by Keynes, Marx and the free-market economists. Have we make any progress? Is the situation worse?

Andy Grove had the same concern in 2010 when he wrote How America Can Create Jobs for Business Week. The Americans are nationalistic, Intel was known to produce almost exclusively in the USA and now Grove is worried. Again I do not have an answer.

Triumph of the Nerds

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When I published Start-Up, a friend and colleague told me: “Why do you want to write something about high-tech entrepreneurship and start-ups. Nobody reads anymore. Make movies, videos!” He may have been right. Now that I heard about a new documentary about Silicon Valley and I will talk about this later in this post, it gave me the opportunity to look backwards. Triumph of the Nerds is a 3-episode (50 mns each) produced in 1996.

It is great, sometimes boring, often funny. Its author Robert X. Cringely is also the author of the related and very good book, Accidental Empires. You can watch the videos on YouTube and read the transcripts on PBS. I found Part I, the best. Part II about Microsoft and IBM is more serious, Part III about Apple is in-between.

First I found the best definition of a Nerd: “I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.”

Then about the semiconductor industry: “Intel not only invented the chip, they are responsible for the laid-back Silicon Valley working style. Everyone was on a first-name basis. There were no reserved parking places, no offices, only cubicles. It’s still true today. Here’s the chairman’s cubicle… Gordon Moore is one of the Intel founders worth $3 billion. With money like that, I’d have a door.” […] “Only Intel didn’t appreciate the brilliance of their own product, seeing it as useful mainly for powering calculators or traffic lights. Intel had all the elements necessary to invent the PC business, but they just didn’t get it.”

“What was needed was a version of some big computer language like BASIC, only modified for the PC. But it didn’t yet exist because the experts all thought that nothing would fit inside the tiny memory. Yet again the experts were wrong.” And here came … Microsoft … and Apple

Steve Jobs: “Remember that the Sixties happened in the early Seventies, right, so you have to remember that and that’s sort of when I came of age. So I saw a lot of this and to me the spark of that was that there was something beyond sort of what you see every day. It’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. And I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I think that that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit.”

Part III talks about how Xerox missed the high-tech revolution and Apple or Adobe used Xerox inventions. The output? “A software nerd is the richest man in the world.” We are in 1996. Gates: “You know, if you take the way the Internet is changing month by month, if somebody can predict what’s going to happen three months from now, nine months from now even today eh my hat’s off to them, I think we’ve got a phenomena here that is moving so rapidly that nobody knows exactly where it will go.”

Yes, it was an Accidental Empire.

There is another documentary Pirates of Silicon Valley but it looks very similar to Triumph of the Nerds, without the humour or Cringely. But the reason of this post, is the recent released of Something Ventured. This I will watch soon and hopefully show at EPFL to students and colleagues.

Here is the trailer: