Category Archives: Silicon Valley and Europe

Biotech data – part 3/3: A short synthesis

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After Genentech, Chiron and Genzyme, let just me do a simple analysis of biotech start-ups. The table which follows summarizes it all and I added Amegn but it is obviously a little tough to read. You can enlarge it however. So you can see data about the companies themselves, foundation year, IPO year, revenues and profit/loss at IPO, current status and then data on founders, their age at foundation, what they were doing before the creation and what they did after the start-up adventure. Then I provide a link on them.

So what is interesting about the companies themselves?

– On average, it takes them 3 years to go public. So the myth that biotech start-ups develop slowly is linked to the revenue/profit status, not the exit status.
– Indeed, when they go public, they have very small revenues and lose money. Compare to Apple for example, on the first picture.
– They are very similar to Internet companies of the late 90s: they go public very soon without revenues and still losing money.
– Finally, they are acquired by European players. This is in total opposition to IT companies where the only buyers are American (check for example slide 36 of the pdf I published in the past).

Now the founders.
– First, they are not young people. Compare again to the same document, slide 27 now. American founders in the slide are on average of 27 year-old, and Europeans, 33 year-old.
– Many had an academic career they did not have to leave. They may have taken sabbaticals but many went back to their academic life. It is obviously related to the previous point.

These 3 posts have shown my small knowledge of biotech but also the fact that they are interesting not to say major differences between Biotech and Information Technology.

The fathers of Silicon Valley: the Traitorous Eight.

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Thanks to a conversation with an EPFL colleague, I was recently reminded the early history of Silicon Valley. I knew about Shockley, Fairchild and the Traitorous Eight. I did not know Shockley had been funded by Beckman (thanks Andrea :-)), that was the point of the recent conversation.

What is interesting is to have a look at the Traitorous 8 also. Their history (cf Wikipédia) is well-known, what may be less known is their background.

The next table gives the origin, education and age of the 8 traitors, the 8 engineers who left Shockley labs to found Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 (click on it to enlarge).

They can be considered as the real fathers of Silicon Valley. The famous poster entitled Silicon Valley Genealogy is certainly a convincing illustration of it as well as their Post-Fairchild activities.

The next image is extracted from the one above (left, mid-height level, corresponding to 1957).

A few comments:
– 5 were educated on the East Coast, 2 on the West Coast and 1 in Europe.
– Indeed, three were from Europe.
– 6 had a PhD (3 from MIT), all had a bachelor.
– They were between 28 and 34-year old in 1957.

What’s wrong with European venture capital?

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It’s the title of a contribution in the Telegraph by Richard Titus. You can read the full article in Start-Up 100: What’s wrong with European venture capital?

I do not agree with 100% of the arguments, but probably 90%, which is good enough. Feel free to react by commenting! (And by the way, there is a French translation in the other side of the blog).

Women, Europe and High-Tech

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Pemo Theodore is doing great interviews of people in high-tech, and she has a specific focus on women & entrepreneurship, on venture capital too, her blog is ezebis. She was interested in my views on the topic, I am not sure why as I am neither an entrepreneur, nor a VC anymore. If you are not afraid of French accents… here it is and the text is on Hervé Lebret, EPFL Swiss Tech Institute, Difference in European & US Venture Capitalists. Thanks, Pemo!

Start-Up Nation: Israel

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Thanks to an opportunity I got to meet with the Israel Chief Scientist, and the fact I was offered Start-Up Nation at the end of the meeting, let me give you my views on this very interesting book. But first a few things about Israel and innovation.

As the map (adapted from John Kao, Harvard and showed at the OCS meeting) indicates, Israel is an innovation superpower. Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Novartis, Nestle and many others are located there. Check Point is just one of the many start-up success stories. Israel has more start-ups quoted on Nasdaq than Europe and venture capital is very active there. Finally the office of the chief scientist manages and funds the public side of innovation in Israel. All this is perfectly analyzed in the book Start-Up Nation that I have just read.

I thought I knew a lot about Israel, but the book is rich in anecdotes. The history of Israel is well described and innovation was probably a necessity to survive. If there is a point I appreciated less is the importance the authors give to the military. They may be right, that’s not the point, but I thought the topic came too often in the chapters. This remains a great book and a must read for anyone interested in high-tech innovation and entrepreneurship.

I’d like now to quote a few things I liked. It’s not structured at all, but I invite you to read the book!

From the Introduction

Google’s CEO and chairman, Eric Schmidt said  that the United States is the number one place in the world for entrepreneurs, but “after the U.S., Israel is the best.” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has called Microsoft “an Israeli company as much as an American company” because of the size and centrality of its Israeli teams.”

The authors begin by explaining that adversity and multidimensionality as much as the talent of individuals, are critical:  “it is a story not just of talent but of tenacity, of insatiable questioning of authority, of determined informality, combined with a unique attitude toward failure, teamwork, mission, risk, and cross-disciplinary creativity.”

Chapter 1- Persistence

The usual joke Americans need to put, but it is a good one!
Four guys are standing on a street corner . . .
an American, a Russian, a Chinese man, and an Israeli. . . .
A reporter comes up to the group and says to them:
“Excuse me. . . . What’s your opinion on the meat shortage?”
The American says: What’s a shortage?
The Russian says: What’s meat?
The Chinese man says: What’s an opinion?
The Israeli says: What’s “Excuse me”?
—MIKE LEIGH, Two Thousand Years

– No inhibition about challenging the logic behind the way things have been done for years.
– A rude, aggressive culture which tolerates failure.
– Israeli attitude and informality flow also from a cultural tolerance for what some Israelis call “constructive failures” or “intelligent failures.”
– It is critical to distinguish between “a well-planned experiment and a roulette wheel
(During the meeting with the chief scientist, there was a similar argument: “if we have a 5% success rate, we’d better give the responsability to donkeys to choose and if it is 70% success rate, we do not take enough risks”)
– Amos Oz talks about “a culture of doubt and argument, an open-ended game of interpretations, counter-interpretations, reinterpretations, opposing interpretations. From the very beginning of the existence of the Jewish civilization, it was recognized by its argumentativeness.”

Chapter 2- Lesson from the military

– Narrow hierarchy and autonomy gives a lot of responsibility to individuals, authority is discussed
– People are mature earlier.
– No need to wait for order to act.
– “The key for leadership is the soldiers’ confidence in their commander. If you don’t trust him, if you’re not confident in him, you can’t follow him.”
– “If you aren’t even aware that the people in the organization disagree with you, then you are in trouble”

– “Real experience also typically comes with age or maturity. But in Israel, you get experience, perspective, and maturity at a younger age, because the society jams so many transformative experiences into Israelis when they’re barely out of high school. By the time they get to college, their heads are in a different place than those of their American counterparts.”… “The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist.”

A dense network – the whole country is one degree of separation (Yossi Vardi)

Chapter 5- Order and chaos

– Singapore’s leaders have failed to keep up in a world that puts a high premium on a trio of attributes historically alien to Singapore’s culture: initiative, risk-taking, and agility; in addition to being real experts who can improvise in situations of crisis.
– Innovation is fundamentally an experimental endeavor (improvisation over discipline)
– Learn from mistake with no fear of losing face.
– Nobody learns from someone who is being self defensive
– Fluidity, according to a new school of economists studying key ingredients for entrepreneurialism, is produced when people can cross boundaries, turn societal norms upside down, and agitate in a free-market economy, all to catalyze radical ideas.

Chapter 7 – Immigration

Immigrants are not averse to starting over. They are, by definition, risk takers. A nation of immigrants is a nation of entrepreneurs.—GIDI GRINSTEIN

Sergey Brin spoke in an Israeli high school: “Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys,” he said in Russian, his choice of language prompting spontaneous applause. “I emigrated from Russia when I was six,” Brin continued. “I went to the United States. Similar to you, I have standard Russian-Jewish parents. My dad is a math professor. They have a certain attitude about studies. And I think I can relate that here, because I was told that your school recently got seven out of the top ten places in a math competition throughout all Israel.” This time the students clapped for their own achievement. “But what I have to say,” Brin continued, cutting through the applause, “is what my father would say—‘What about the other three?

The authors mention the seminal work of AnnaLee Saxenian (Regional advantage, the New Argonauts). As a few examples of Israel tech. diaspora mentioned in the book:
– Dov Frohman – Intel – 1974 –  Wikipedia link. Apparently Israel has been the core of Intel innovation in the past decade and Intel is the largest private employer in Israel.
– Michael Laor – Cisco – 1997 –  Linkedin profile. Cisco has acquired 9 israeli start-ups since Laor came back (more acquisitions than in any other country except the USA)
– Yoelle Maarek – Google –  http://yoelle.com now at Yahoo!

But one should not forget Mirabilis/ICQ (see below)  or Check Point. Check Point was established in 1993, by the company’s current Chairman & CEO Gil Shwed, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Shwed at the age of 25, together with two of his friends, Marius Nacht (currently serving as Vice Chairman) and Shlomo Kramer (who left Check Point in 2003 to set up a new company).

Chapter 9 – Yozma

Another member of the tech. diaspora: Orna Berry – PhD USC – Unisys-IBM then Ornet and Gemini then OCS chief… The VC industry was really launched through the Yozma effort as well as Israeli incubators. Gemini was the first Israel fund. See the wikipedia article about venture capital in Israel.

Another quote on start-ups vs. more mature industries: “In aerospace, you can’t be an entrepreneur,” he explained. “The government owns the industry, and the projects are huge. But I learned a lot of technical things there that helped me immensely later on.”

Chapter 12 – Transdisciplinarity

“There’s a multitask mentality here.” The multitasking mentality produces an environment in which job titles—and the compartmentalization that goes along with them—don’t mean much.
– “Combining mathematics, biology, computer science, and organic chemistry at Compugen”
– “Putting this together required an unorthodox combination of engineering skills.”

The term in the United States for this kind of crossover is a mashup. And the term itself has been rapidly morphing and acquiring new meanings. … An even more powerful mashup, in our view, is when innovation is born from the combination of radically different technologies and disciplines. The companies where mashups are most common in Israel are in the medical-device and biotech sectors, where you find wind tunnel engineers and doctors collaborating on a credit card–sized device.

But the authors do not forget to mention that Israel is A country with a motive

Role models

Though Israel was already well into its high-tech swing by then, the ICQ sale was a national phenomenon. It inspired many more Israelis to become entrepreneurs. The founders, after all, were a group of young hippies. Exhibiting the common Israeli response to all forms of success, many figured, If these guys did it, I can do it better. Further, the sale was a source of national pride, like winning a gold medal in the world’s technology Olympics.

“There’s a legitimate way to make a profit because you’re inventing something,” says Erel Margalit “You talk about a way of life—not necessarily about how much money you’re going to make, though it’s obviously also about that.”

“Indeed, what makes the current Israeli blend so powerful is that it is a mashup of the founders’ patriotism, drive, and constant consciousness of scarcity and adversity and the curiosity and restlessness that have deep roots in Israeli and Jewish history. “The greatest contribution of the Jewish people in history is dissatisfaction,” Peres explained.

Again “Not just talent, but tenacity, insatiable questioning of authority, determined informality, unique attitude toward failure, teamwork, mission, risk and cross-disciplinary creativity.”

As a conclusion

“So what is the answer to the central question of this book: What makes Israel so innovative and entrepreneurial? The most obvious explanation lies in a classic cluster of the type Harvard professor Michael Porter has championed, Silicon Valley embodies. It consists of the tight proximity of great universities, large companies, start-ups, and the ecosystem that connects them—including everything from suppliers, an engineering talent pool, and venture capital. Part of this more visible part of the cluster is the role of the military in pumping R&D funds into cutting-edge systems and elite technological units, and the spillover from this substantial investment, both in technologies and human resources, into the civilian economy. … But this outside layer does not fully explain Israel’s success. Singapore has a strong educational system. Korea has conscription and has been facing a massive security threat for its entire existence. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Ireland are relatively small countries with advanced technology and excellent infrastructure; they have produced lots of patents and reaped robust economic growth. Some of these countries have grown faster for longer than Israel has and enjoy higher standards of living, but none of them have produced anywhere near the number of start-ups or have attracted similarly high levels of venture capital investments. What’s missing in these other countries is a cultural core built on a rich stew of aggressiveness and team orientation, on isolation and connectedness, and on being small and aiming big. Quantifying that hidden, cultural part of an economy is no easy feat. An unusual combination of cultural attributes. In fact, Israel scores high on egalitarianism, nurturing, and individualism. In Israel, the seemingly contradictory attributes of being both driven and “flat,” both ambitious and collectivist make sense when you throw in the experience that so many Israelis go through in the military. There is no leadership without personal example and without inspiring your team. The secret, then, of Israel’s success is the combination of classic elements of technology clusters with some unique Israeli elements that enhance the skills and experience of individuals, make them work together more effectively as teams, and provide tight and readily available connections within an established and growing community.

If you have arrived here, you were interested enough in this long article. Logically, your next move would be to buy Start-Up Nation!

Early mornings on innovation at the Swiss National Radio

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I was invited this morning on RSR, the (french-speaking) Swiss National Radio, to talk about innovation and start-ups in their morning (5am to 6am!) Petits Matins. For those who know about the topic, nothing fundamentally new, with the slight exception that I learnt recently that a common feature to many entrepreneurs would be dyslexia (two studies were made in the USA and the UK). In total, a 30-minute conversation on my favorite topic, that you may listen on the RSR website if French is a language you like. Many thanks to Manuela Salvi, the talended RSR journalist.

More importantly, I could invite a guest on the phone at 5:45am (what a gift!) I was delighted to let Peter Harboe-Schmidt talk about his novel The Ultimate Cure, a beautiful thriller with a Lausanne-based biotech start-up as the background. I had already mentioned that book on this blog. Peter just announced the novel had just been translated in French.

Start-up Soldier vs. Start-Up Hero

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I just discovered a Techcrunch post about “Silicon Envy”. It’s entitled Is the search for the Startup Hero holding back startup teams?

There is a lot of interesting content and if you have the time, listen to the full roundtable. It’s a good summary of our current or maybe complexity crisis. I do not agree with all arguments, for example the ones saying Europe is weak because of regulations. I believe it’s cultural. But probably, regulations change culture over the long term.

I noticed the usual-suspect arguments:
– You need a culture of rivalry and competition.
– You need money which means smart capital.
– We need an education to build (products and companies) not only academic skills.
– You need to be international from day one and not local only, so do not be modest. The topic of language was seen as much as an asset as a liability for Europe.

Esther Dyson is quite convincing in our need for the skills to build company. “In Europe, your mother tells you to work for SAP or Coca Cola.” Then she added it’s easy to create a 5-people company but it is tough to scale to 1’000 and there you need middle managers and skills. You may read Esther Dyson directly in her own post The Dangerous Myth of the Hero Entrepreneur. As important, Esther Dyson shows it is a complex topic.

As she nicely wrote in her post:
“But there are two benefits that do redound to a hero entrepreneur’s home country. First, the local entrepreneur serves as a role model. He (rarely she) encourages people to dream – and also to take risks, persist in the face of long odds, and generate economic activity.
(…)
Yet sometimes I think this hero-entrepreneur myth is dangerous. In an economy such as the United States, where start-ups are revered, people who would make perfectly good project supervisors or salespeople establish their own companies, starving the ecosystem of middle managers. Thousands of perfectly smart and highly useful people feel inadequate because they are not heroes. Many make the wrong career choices in search of glory.
(…)
In cultures where start-ups are considered risky and not quite honorable, it’s also hard for entrepreneurs to find troops to play the non-starring roles. Most people would rather work for an established company, or for the government.
So, rather than focusing on the supposed shortage of entrepreneurs, consider for a moment the very real shortage of qualified people willing to work for them.”

Start-Up in Russian

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My book is now available in Russian. You can find more info by clicking here or on the picture below. Using Google Translate you can read what the people who publish it say about it:

Dear readers!

We are glad to present the book “Start-up. What we may still learn from Silicon Valley, by the author Hervé Lebret [1]. The book is a translation of the English-language original. In Russia, it is published as a joint project company “Corporate Edition” and the Russian Venture Company. The purpose of the book – to provide start-ups information with a different perspective. The book begins with the author’s story of Silicon Valley start-ups, which gradually becomes a description of the region. The second part is devoted to Europe, where start-ups as a phenomenon have been less successful. Analyzing the causes of successes and failures, the author cites numerous examples from real life, considering the history of building successful companies from ideas.

Hervé Lebret tells of his personal vision of Silicon Valley and its culture, describes the companies and the individuals through the prism of fascinating stories of success and failure, of which the reader is sure to extract useful lessons. In presenting his individual views, the author demonstrates a remarkable ability to penetrate into the essence of things and see the difference between “old Europe” and “Young America.”

The book is unique in terms of number of analytical and reference material and, according to Alexandra Johnson is the best book, that tells of Silicon Valley. This book will be of interest not only to experts on innovation and entrepreneurs in high tech, but anyone who is interested in history and economics of startups.

Currently, innovation ecosystem of Russia is still in its formative stage. Innovative infrastructure sometimes patchy, new venture capital firms are perceived as extremely risky. However, there is an intentional movement to build “smart economy”: in the country, there are business incubators, venture funds, lobby for the interests of small and medium businesses, Russia is amended its laws relating to intellectual property and copyright, to increase the number of successful innovative projects.

We believe that the book will help us one more time “to learn from Silicon Valley”, to understand the secret of her success, to adopt its competitive advantage and bring them to our Russian reality.

You can buy books related to the formulation by phone or email. Cost of the book is 300 rubles
Contact: Olga Morozova
Tel: 8 (495) 783 44 07
e-mail: ads@corporatepublishing.ru

[1] Hervé Lebret his entire life engaged in high technology. After spending several years in academic research, in 1997 he became a venture capitalist, joined the fund Index Ventures. Since 2005 he manages the Innovation Fund to support entrepreneurs and start-ups in high technology at the Polytechnic School in Lausanne (Switzerland). Has a doctorate in electrical engineering, a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique in France and at Stanford University in the U.S..