Category Archives: Silicon Valley and Europe

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..

Finland (part 3)

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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)

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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

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    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?

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    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.

    Boulevard of Broken Dreams

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    A colleague of mine (thanks Jean-Jacques) recently mentioned to me this book by Josh Lerner, which full title is Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed–and What to Do About It. I was all the more interested that Lerner is the author of many academic papers on high-tech entrepreneurship, and particularly of one about serial entrepreneurs: “Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship” [pdf format here] with Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, and David Scharfstein, Journal of Financial Economics, 62 (2007), 731-764. I will come back in the future on this topic which I am currently studying.

    So what should we do about the public efforts is what Lerner is trying to help us with and his answer shows how challenging the topic is. What is beautiful about the author (my personal point of view) is that he likes history (just like me). Just like Steve Jobs! Just read again what I posted about Jobs on mentors; “You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before”.

    Lerner’s initial chapter is “A Look Backwards” He shows how entrepreneurs and investors benefited and suffered from each other in the 70s and 80s, including the excess of speculative bubbles, the PC burst of the 80s for example. He also shows how important public support was in the very early days through the funding of research (mostly the cold war militaries) and the legal actions to ease venture capital (SBIRs, Erisa Acts) so that he does not really agree with Rodgers (founder of Cypress) who wanted government out of Silicon Valley (page 32) so that he claims that “The Public sector did play a key role in shaping the evolution of Silicon Valley” (page 35).

    Then, in the following chapters he shows how complex it is to find facts: “consistent information on venture-backed firms that were acquired or went out of business doesn’t exist” (page 59) which means that quantitative analysis is rare. And remember he is a respected academic, so he knows! What he tried to do then, is to show some of the obvious mistakes: incompetence in allocating public resources (page 73), capture, that is use of subsidies by the wrong groups (page 80), by “organizations that are mandated to help entrepreneurs” (page 83). “Seven of the incubators gave less than 50% of funding in cash to incubated firms” (just one example from Australia, page 84) or the SBIR program which has exhausted its usefulness (page 85).

    So his advice is:
    – enhancing the entrepreneurial culture (page 90) [through the right laws, the access to technologies, tax incentives and training],
    – increasing the venture market’s attractiveness (page 100) [through allowing partnerships, creating local markets, accessing human capital abroad],
    – avoiding common mistakes: timing [be patient], sizing [not too small, not too large], flexibility [learn by doing], create the right incentives [and here it is a complex situation as perverse effects from good ideas often occur] and evaluate [which does not happen often enough].

    Indeed, his introduction (pages 12 and following ones) summarized it all: you need rules, experience, time, incentives and assessment. But with all his experience and knowledge about high-tech entrepreneurship, Lerner is very humble with the lessons: the topic is really complicated, all these advice have to be implemented together and it is really their careful interconnections which will make an ecosystem lively or not. Then it is my personal conclusion that such favorable conditions will be useful if entrepreneurs use them intelligently. So the reason why all this fails has many roots…

    I cannot finish this post without comparing it to my book. It is indeed very similar in its conclusions with slightly different facts and figures. So you would learn complementary and consistent things by reading both! My thesis is we need an entrepreneurial culture and access to people from Silicon Valley who have the experience. Everything else is necessary but not sufficient.

    There will never be another Silicon Valley

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    Well who am I to predict the future? In fact I do not know but I really doubt it. Famous bloggers have mentioned the topic again recently. In Techcrunch it was Can Russia Build A Silicon Valley? by Vivek Wadhwa. And in the Equity Kicker, it was Building an ecosystem to rival Silicon Valley by Nic Brisbourne. I reacted to both in the following way:

    What a topic! Clearly something which has been around for… at least 35 years (I mean how to replicate SV). The fact that we still discuss it shows how complex it is. It has been my main concern in the last years and for the beauty of the debate (that’s what blogs are about, right?) let me play the devil’s advocate fully. At an extreme, I do not think there will ever be another Silicon Valley. For example, Kenney claims in his book on SV it requires 5 basic ingredients: universities of high caliber (Stanford and Berkeley in SV), a strong investor base, service providers, high-tech professionals (who accept to leave their big companies for start-ups so from Intel, Cisco, Apple, MSFT, even Google now to the next wave) and last but not least an entrepreneurial culture. All this is not easy to gather. But even worse, SV was probably an accident, a monster which was never successfully replicated. Saxenian showed in Regional Advantage how even the Boston area failed and the fact that Paul Graham moved ycombinator fully out of Boston to SV is just another sign. In Europe, Sophia Antipolis was a first experience … in 1972 so? So you need a rare combination of ingredients in the recipe and hope the oven is at the right temperature for a long, long time. Now I am playing devil’s advocate so things are not so bad. As a positive reaction, let me add my own analysis: I am not sure governments are good at innovation, they are good at stimulating research. The US federal govt has put billions through DARPA, NIH, DOE, etc, and this obviously helped Stanford, Berkeley to be the best universities worldwide (see the rankings) and the Internet to be created. Long term investment in infrastructure is what gvts are good at (education, research, transport…) Then, yes, bridges with SV are critical. It is exactly how Israel, Taiwan, then India and China have been successful with their diasporas. Countries should invite back the experienced migrants. When he has time, Brin should help Russia or Levchin Ukraine, or even Grove Hungary etc… I am less sure tax credits, admin, legal tools have been so useful in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when SV was its in early days. As a conclusion, it is and will remain for a while a great topic.

    Of course, my reaction was not as important as the source of the posts: Russia wants to be more innovative and commissioned a report to assess experiments of innovation ecosystems. The result is the following report: Yaroslavl Roadmap 10-15-20 (pdf format.)

    There isn’t anything really new in this report, at least for innovation experts. But it is a very good synthesis of what the USA, Israel, Finland, India, and Taiwan have tried, be successful in, but also in what they failed.  The historical summaries are great and full of good lessons. I had the feeling the authors put too much emphasis on infrastructure vs. culture. It is my own bias again! They mention culture a lot, but they may be aware also that it’s the most difficult thing to create… If you like the topic, you should certainly download and read the pdf, and build your own opinion.

    What is the mentor role?

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    I recently read Fred Wilson’s post on The CEO Mentor and Coach. As usual his post and the high number of comments are interesting. I would just like to add one of the best descriptions of a mentor I have read. It is what Robert Noyce represented for Steve Jobs. You can find the full account in the book The Man Behind the Microchip by Leslie Berlin or in a shorter account she gave for the Computer History Museum (pdf file – 6MB).

    So here is a short account of Noyce’s mentoring!

    “Bob Noyce took me under his wing. I was young, in my twenties. He was in his early fifties. He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand. You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before”

    “When Noyce left daily management at Intel in 1975, he turned his attention to the next generation of high-tech entrepreneurs. This is how he met Jobs.” Noyce was not attracted initially by the hippie style, “but over time, Noyce’s feelings about Apple began to change. This was due, in no small measure, to Steve Jobs, who deliberately sought out Noyce as a mentor. (Jobs also asked Jerry Sanders and Andy Grove if he could take them to lunch every quarter and “pick your brain”). “Steve would regularly appear at our house on his motorcycle” Bowers [Noyce’s wife] recalls “Soon he and Bob were disappearing into the basement, talking about projects.”

    Noyce answered Jobs’ phone calls – which invariably began with “I’ve been thinking about what you said” or “I have an idea” – even when they came at midnight. At some point he confided to Bowers, “If he calls late again, I’m going to kill him,” but still he answered the phone.

    Jobs agrees that his relationship was almost more filial than professional. “The things I remember about Bob are the personal things. I remember him teaching me how to ski better. And he was very interested in – fascinated by – the personal computer, and we talked a lot about that.

    Super Angels

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    I just come back from vacation and all of a sudden I discover that the world has changed! Before my break you had the business angels investing in the early rounds (up to $1M) and the VCs who would seldom invest in rounds smaller than $1-2M. Now the frontier is blurred: you have the seed VCs (Index seed being a recent one) and the Super Angels fighting for the same deals.

    If you want to know more, you will find plenty of posts and news such as:

    VCs And Super Angels: The War For The Entrepreneur from Techcrunch.

    Why Micro-VCs Are So Damn Friendly from Xconomy.

    ‘Super Angels’ Alight from the WSJ.

    Micro VCs Are all BFFs… Forever? by David Beisel.

    All this is not so new as Business Week mentioned the phenomenon in May 2009: ‘Super Angels’ Shake Up Venture Capital.

    And I should not forget Fred Destin’s blog where i first read about all this: Super Angels, Lean VCs, Proto-Incubators, whatever. Focus on social contract. He also published an article about European SuperAngels.

    So what is new here? Well I am not sure, I may just be so much remote that I have missed a big trend. Or is it just that the VC and high-tech world is such in a crisis that it is looking for new models. They were always big angels. Arthur Rock for Intel and Apple, Andy Bechtolsheim for Google or Magma, and Sequoia did the seed round for Yahoo, so what?

    Well the VCs have really big funds up to a billion so investing in small rounds is tough but they have understood and move back to seed. Entrepreneurs think angels are nicer, but check again my posts on the Tesla story and Elon Musk.

    Finally there is a strong argument that Internet and software companies may not need as much capital as start-ups in the past and another argument that entrepreneurs just look to sell their company to Google for $25M which is not so bad, so they might not need VCs anymore. But then, Silicon Valley faces the risk of not creating new Apples or Googles… So it is probably just “back to the future”…