Category Archives: Silicon Valley and Europe

Start-Up Nation: Israel

5 Replies

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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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

3 Replies

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..

Finland (part 3)

2 Replies

Last week, I had lunch with Pekka Roine. This follows my trip to Finland (and my recent posts) where many people advised me to meet this Finn living in Switzerland. He described himself has bbb = big, bald, and bearded… so I answered back I was gg = grey hair and glasses so that we could find each other on the EPFL campus.

We have one thing in common: we spent some time at Stanford University and he told me something about it. He mentioned this experience was great for 3 reasons,
– the least important one is that Stanford has the best professors in the world,
– the second least important is that when you are there, you know at least 200 people who are like you, so you are not isolated,
– but the most important is that you are away from home and it gives perspective and new horizons.

Pekka worked for DEC before the company disappeared and experienced the best years of the company. Then he became an independent since 1994 and he has been on the board of 25 companies and also helped in launching 2 VC firms, PTV and Conor.

So we discussed how to help our entrepreneurs. He believes in Israel and its incubator model where people who know how to run them select 2-3% of the best projects and follow them closely. He told me about this guy who failed his 1st start-up, M&Aed the 2nd, IPOed the 3rd so felt qualified to run an incubator. Good point!

I am not a big fan of incubator, someone had told me if I meant incinerator, but with a model where the Yozma tools were privatized with the right incentives and people, this is a different story. So is this a way to solve the unsolvable, this chicken and egg problem that we do not have enough role models and entrepreneurs following the right models. Pekka believes in exchanges with Israel, I believe in the Go West which has similarities. There has to be a way we can convince our decision makers at the academic and national level, and we should not stop trying because we are RIGHT, Pekka! We need to create high-growth companies which are the places for the future jobs for our kids.

There is no doubt that Finns and Finland were inspiring for me!

A small addition: I just discovered (I mean on November 13) this article from the Helsinki Times, following an interview I had given during my trip.


Finland (part 2.5)

1 Reply

Following my 1.5 previous posts about Finland (https://www.startup-book.com/2010/10/28/israel-through-finland and https://www.startup-book.com/2008/04/03/finland) here are some of the interesting lessons I learnt from my Nordic friends. Let me add I visited Aalto University as well as the University of Applied Sciences in Jyväskylä.

The main lesson I got there is that small countries such as Finland, Switzerland or Israel need to be open countries. Nokia is a good example of what a small country can achieve but the company is also worrying Finns at the moment as it is losing some traction to Apple and Android. So Finland needs to look for more fresh air. That’s probably why Finland is so open to new ideas from Israel or the USA. You should just check my post of yesterday to see how both countries have been references for Finland.

At Aalto, I particularly liked a few experiments such as

  • their Venture Garage

  • their Entrepreneurship Society
  • and obviously their trip to SV

    • Will Caldwell is heading a large piece of the effort with his colleagues and I met many passionate people including Pauli, Teemu, Panu, Jari, Paolo, Ramine, Matalie, Juha, Kristo and my apologies to the ones I forget…

    Internationalization does not mean just sending people or businesses out but attracting people in. I was very interested by a recent report, the Silicon Valley Journey, Experiences of Finnish IT Startups from Dot-Com Boom to 2010, on Finns based in Silicon Valley, the experience of which should be used. There is an awareness that we never know enough about how SV is performing and our ecosystems (students, entrepreneurs, investors and support) should always know better about it. And it also means attracting international VCs something Israel (and Switzerland by the way) has been quite good at.

    Things were very similar in Jyväskylä, though it is quite far from the main capital city, Helsinki. Just three examples:

    – the mentors such as Jussi Nukari, also an author of “Launching Your Software Business in America”

    – the Protomo experiment which supports local entrepreneurs

    – the entrepreneurship courses given by Sharon Ballard from Arizona (who also challenged me about the efficiency of the SBIR program in the USA, something I had/have been skeptical about 🙂 but this is another story!). Sharon is bringing a typical American attitude to European students. And what I liked there is that it was not just Finnish students, but a group of international young and enthusiastic people!

    My thanks here to Juha Saukkonen who invited me to JAMK and who may have forgotten he was the 1st person to mention the Victa report to me, and thanks to all his colleagues, Asta, Mari, Heikki, Sharon, Jussi, Kari, Marko, and… Juha, Juha, Juha and Juha again.

    Any negative lesson? I feel a recurrent issue about critical mass in Europe. Any country, any region, any city in Europe is trying to promote innovation and they must do it. But are we taking the risk of diluting the effort by not taking strong decisions on a few hot spots, as we do it by the way for education, research or even sports or arts? I do not have any good answer and we all know we have to try and try again. But the USA have one SV only even if they have other clusters in Boston, Triangle Park, Seattle, or Austin. But we do not have our Silicon Valley in Europe. So how much are all these efforts efficient is a tough question?

    The Social Network

    2 Replies

    The new movie about Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is a great movie. It does not matter so much if it is a description of reality. You may watch it as a piece of fiction, and it would remain a great movie thanks to the actors and screenplay.

    It is also great because it describes the start-up world in a very accurate manner. It is not a movie about start-ups really, but there are details which reminds me a lot of real-life stories.

    The first lesson is that money and friendship seldom work together. The stories of Eduardo Saverin, the founder soon to be diluted, Sean Parker, the exhuberant founder of Napster and Plaxo and mentor of Zuckenberg and the short appearance of Peter Thiel are such examples.

    It also shows the old world of Boston where people think ideas are crucial and the new world of Silicon Valley where what matters is implementation. It’s why Silicon Valley is the Triumph of the Nerds. It shows how right Paul Graham is when he says Silicon Valley is about nerds and money. You see the crazy, sad, exciting, depressing life of these hard-working people. You may like it or not, but it is mostly what start-ups are about.

    I just looked for what some key people thought of the movie. So, for example, Eduardo Saverin said here: “The Social Network” was bigger and more important than whether the scenes and details included in the script were accurate. After all, the movie was clearly intended to be entertainment and not a fact-based documentary. What struck me most was not what happened – and what did not – and who said what to whom and why. The true takeaway for me was that entrepreneurship and creativity, however complicated, difficult or tortured to execute, are perhaps the most important drivers of business today and the growth of our economy.”

    And Dustin Moskovitz said there: It is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn’t matter (like the Winklevosses, who I’ve still never even met and had no part in the work we did to create the site over the past 6 years) and leaves out things that really did (like the many other people in our lives at the time, who supported us in innumerable ways). Other than that, it’s just cool to see a dramatization of history. A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things; the version in the trailer seems a lot more exciting, so I’m just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds. […] I’m very curious to see how Mark turns out in the end – the plot of the book/script unabashedly attack him, but I actually felt like a lot of his positive qualities come out truthfully in the trailer (soundtrack aside). At the end of the day, they cannot help but portray him as the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is. And the Ad Board *does* owe him some recognition, dammit.

    And Zuckerberg himself!

    Watch live video from c3oorg on Justin.tv
    This is from Garham’s start-up school and here is part 2

    Watch live video from c3oorg on Justin.tv

    Of course, this looks like corporate language, we should remember these guys have FaceBook shares! Talking about shares, there was another thing I did not like recently, the fact that according to Forbes, Zuckerberg would be richer than Steve Jobs. I had a discussion with a friend over the week end and he agreed with the statement whereas I disagreed. It may be a detail: but as long as Facebook is not quoted, Zuckerberg’s wealth is mostly paper value he can not really trade. I am sure he is already rich, he probably has already monetized some of his shares but not all of them whereas Jobs owns shares which are liquid. It may not be a big difference given the success of Facebook, but I have seen to many stories of start-ups where people thought the paper value of the stock was real wealth and the next day worth nothing…

    When my daughter told me yesterday, she might at least explain her friends what her dad was doing. i.e. working in the world of start-ups, I thought the movie had at least reached that goal of reaching a large audience towards this important topic!

    Final point, a recurrent topic in my blog: Facebook cap. table and shareholder structure. As Facebook is private, it is a challenge to know what’s true and what’s myth. I have still tried the exercice from what the Internet gives. One interesting feature is Saverin’s dilution from 30% to 5% whereas Zuckerberg went from 65% to 24%, not really pro-rata! We shall see when Facebook goes public, who wrong I was!

    A Swiss (European) way for entrepreneurship?

    1 Reply

    With my seventh contribution to the Créateurs newsletter, I stay in Switzerland again with two succesful SMEs. Enjoy!


    There is a recurrent debate in the world of high-tech start-ups: and if the American model of fast growth supported by aggressive venture capital was not adapted for European or Swiss entrepreneurs? Two examples may contribute to the discussion: Sensirion and Mimotec.

    In my contribution to Créateurs last time, I had focused on Swissquote, which has become a magnificent success story, without that venture capital, which is so much criticized these days. Mimotec is an EPFL spin-off with 24 employees and about CHF10M in revenues. The company provides micro technologies for the watch industry. Mimotec was founded in 1998 by Hubert Lorenz who told his start-up’s story during a recent venture ideas conference at EPFL. It is a clear example of organic growth, a steady growth even if not exponential.

    Sensirion is probably more impressive. Founded also in 2008, it is an ETHZ spin-off and it sells pressure sensors, another field of expertise in Switzerland. In an article published for the MEMS 2008 conference, Felix Mayer, Sensirion’s co-founder and CEO, described the growth model of his company. Here is an extract: “The Europeans – especially the Swiss – do not go for the big thing! They rather start small and put one foot in front of the other. A characteristic of the European and Swiss mentality is not to promise high returns for a business idea based on an immature new technology. The European way is rather to start with the own money, to try to find customers, and to grow with the earnings. The Americans, as far as I can tell, follow the motto: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars”. This means: to go for the new big thing, write down a promising business plan, and raise money to realize it. Hunting for potentially high gains means, on the other hand, to take a higher risk. The United States have more of a high risk culture. However, if you fail, you also get a second chance. Europe is different in this respect”.

    Mayer adds that because the financial means are lacking, the European entrepreneur will be more challenged to target the very big markets. Therefore he believes in an intermediate path which will not generate Google-like companies, but leaders in their niche. Thanks to the patient support from a business angel and then from its customers, Sensirion can be proud in 2010 of its 180 employees (the revenue numbers are not public as the start-ups is still privately held). I should however add that it took Sensirion six years before ti could fund its growth through its profits; its business angel was apparently critical to its success.

    Is there a model that Europe may follow without just copying the Silicon Valley way? Yes, if we notice that very few companies could reach the size of Logitech or Actelion for example. Whatever the success of an Hubert Lorenz or a Felix Mayer, I cannot help expressing again the same thing I did in my book Start-Up. Why should not Europe ambition the same large success the USA experience in addition to our mid-size stories. Don’t you think the Americans do not have companies similar to Mimotec and Sensirion, in addition to Google or Apple? Criticizing venture capital might be an easy way and I prefer quoting an American entrepreneur on investors: “You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them” And let us not forget that Google has today about 20’000 employees and it was founded in… 1998. There is no doubt that our culture and financial support is not made to produce our own Google but I seriously believe that we should not be afraid of having large ambitions instead of criticizing an American model which also has great assets.