Category Archives: Silicon Valley and Europe

A remarkable analysis of European weaknesses: the acquisition of Withings according to François Nemo

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Sometimes I make a copy/paste of articles that I have particularly appreciated, with the objective of then translating them to English from the French part of this blog. (Sorry for the bad English, this is pretty quick and dirty). Here I will add my own comments in brackets and italics. You can find the original article and the comments on Frenchweb.fr.

Withings or the story of a French naivety
François Nemo expert in disruptive strategies.

The spectacular acquisition of Withings by Nokia does not illustrate as it is always argued the weakness of our financing system but the lack of vision and commitment of our entrepreneurial scene. It shows our failure in creating an ecosystem with the right scale to position ourselves in the digital war against China and the United States. It is time to mobilize our energies to “beat the GAFA” and defend our sovereignty.

[For years, I have been saying that we do not have so much a funding problem, but a problem of culture, a complete misunderstanding of the importance of start-ups and their growth.]

After Captain Train bought by the British for €200M, it is now an emblem of the French technology, Withings – which made the buzz at CES in Las Vegas by playing the “made in France” card, – to be bought by Nokia to €170M. And I am ready to bet that Blalacar would not withstand a proposal from Facebook if it decided to introduce carpooling in its range of services to connect the planet. The adventure of the so-called French jewels has unfortunately only one outcome: a big check!

[I will let you browse my documents on Slideshare and especially the one that compares Europe and Silicon Valley and its slide 37]

Intelligence First

As technology develops, the more it disappears behind the ideas. The “purpose” or the “raison d’être”. The big digital players have understood this by turning to “intelligence first.” The product is a feature that is integrated in a platform whose role is to solve the world’s problems, health, travel, leisure … manage a community, organize a circular, iterative, open and inclusive ecosystem that connects direct users and producers to shorten and optimize the interaction. This is the announced death of sites and applications. The role of the entrepreneur is then to defend a “vision” and then to design the system to match it. He is a conductor more than a resource creator who will defend the key assets of the company; ideas and data. In this new context, mono-products like Withings companies have no chance to grow if not to integrate an ecosystem. One can also wonder about the real benefits for Whitings of being acquired by Nokia? Dropbox or Evernote had bitter experiences in yielding to the striking power of large platforms. And what about the relevance of that phrase of Steve Job: “You are a feature, not a product” by refusing to buy Dropbox ten years ago?

The new war of ecosystems

This is on the field of ecosystems that now compete the two giants of the digital world, the United States with GAFA, underpinned by an ideology, and China with more pragmatic companies like Alibaba, WeChat who developed new ecosystems in booming sectors by creating new business models and which after reaching an impressive number of users on their domestic market are beginning to position themselves internationally by triggering a fierce fight with the Americans. It is in this context that the GAFA (mostly) do their “market” in the four corners of the planet to feed and enrich their ecosystem. And France with the quality of its research and its dynamic start-ups is a particularly attractive hunting ground.

Why Europe is not able to create worldwide ecosystems?

The acquisition Withings is not as it is claimed a financing problem, an inadequate investment European ecosystem that would prevent a rapid scale-up of our jewels. The scope of Withings whatever the funds injected made impossible anyway a development outside of any platform. The question is why Europe is not able to create worldwide ecosystems in which promisng start-ups like Withings find their place?

[The failure of the European Union is not political only. There is also economic failure. So much fragmentation and so much national selfishness …].

We do not think digital at the right scale!

Our speech about the “Made in France”, staged around our digital champions and their presence at CES supported by the Minister of Economy himself is something naive and pathetic. All the institutional and private infrastructure, accelerators, think tanks, French tech, CNNum, Ecole 42, The Family, accelerator or NUMA, to name only the most prominent are not programmed to develop platforms with visions but products and features or laws and reports. This is our economic and entrepreneurial culture that is in question. A world still very marked by the culture of the engineer and the specialist. A world that is unfamiliar with and remains wary of notions of vision and commitment and more generally to the world of ideas. Rather conservative entrepreneurs who do not perceive the deeply subversive nature of the digital revolution and the need to change the “scale of thinking.”

Large groups who all have a start-up potential

We could also rely on large established groups who all have a start-up potential just like the American Goldman Sachs saying: “We are no longer a bank, but a technology company, we are the Google of finance” by having three thousand five hundred people working on the subject and by announcing a series of measures such as giving access to market and risk management data as open source. One can easily imagine corporations like La Poste and Groupama which business will be radically challenged in the next five years preparing for the future by organizing an ecosystem around wellness and healthcare (for example) that would integrate their know-how with Withings. But listening to the representatives of the major groups, Pierre Gattaz or Carlos Ghosn, for example, one quickly perceives their shortsightedness and lack of interest (they have nothing to gain) for disruptive strategies.

[Which role models or mentors could have our young generations in Europe, not only in France, at the end of their studies? How could they build GAFAs when the model is today the CAC40 and a very engineering culture, indeed].

Are we ready to live in an ” Fisher Price Internet”

Are we doomed to become satellites, and lose our economic sovereignty and security by staying under the influence of GAFA. Or as proposed François Candelon, Senior Manager at the Boston Consulting Group in a very good article “look at what China can teach and bring” and “create a Digital Silk Road”. Are we doomed to choose between Scylla and Charybdis? No! Because even if the web giants with their vision paved the way to new relationships by building the most disruptive companies in history, they leave us facing a huge gap. The “technical transformation of the individual.” Are we ready to live in an ” Fisher Price Internet” as Viuz claimed “in closed houses” run by machines “with chubby groves, manicured lawns and paved roads” where exclusivity, premium and scarcity matter leaving out of the door a part of the population. A kind of ultra-secure retirement homes for the wealthy?

Breaking the GAFA

We must unhesitatingly rush into a third track: “Breaking the GAFA”. If the formula is somewhat provocative, it encourages mobilization. The gap will be difficult to catch up, but it is time for Europe to build on its historical and fundamental values to build new ecosystems and enter fully into the economic war between the two major blocs. Propose alternatives to GAFA. “Use algorithms and artificial intelligence to create an augmented intelligence and solve the complex problems that the ecological and social emergency create” as said Yann Moulier Boutang. Integrate new technologies to rebalance the power relationships, find the keys to a true economy of sharing and knowledge to tackle the question of the future of work, compensation, health, freedom, education …

To scale

A rupture that requires a change of scale by challenging our economic culture and our understanding of the world. A rupture which, even if it still faces a “diabolical” inertia, has become a necessity for many of us.

If you are part of this new “generation” of “intelligence first”, if you have ideas and solutions to change our scale of reflection, I invite you to join us on Twitter or email @ifbranding f.nemo@ifbranding.fr together, we have solutions to propose and build projects.

The author
François Nemo expert in disruptive strategies.
Website: ifbranding.fr
Twitter: @ifbranding
Medium: @ifbranding

Cisco’s A&D

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In 2009, I had analyzed Cisco’s strategy of Acquisitions and Development (A&D) which was claimed to be a substitute to R&D. You can have a look at my previous article also entitled Cisco’s A&D. I decided to redo the same analysis, i.e. the size of Cisco per year (sales and employees) as well as the number and values of its acquisitions. I also analyzed the geographical location of these acquisitions. The results follow. I just add that Silicon Valley remains the main source of acquisitions. The total value of the M&As were about $75B ($48B until 2006 and $27B in the last 10 years).

Cisco_1984_2016_figures

Cisco_1984_2016

Cisco_1984_2016_geography_figures

Cisco_1984_2016_geography

Finally the exhaustive list (from Cisco’s web site and Wikipedia).

Cisco_M&A_1993_2006

Cisco_M&A_2007_2016

How to become a hub for startups?

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This is the subject that “génialissime” Paul Graham addresses in the speech How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub, a speech he has just published on his blog. I say “génialissime” because every time I read him, I am excited by the simplicity of his messages even if often counter-intuitive. Thus in How to be Silicon Valley?, he said “Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it’s full of rich people, it has few nerds. It’s not the kind of place nerds like. Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people.” Yet he returned to Pittsburgh to give his recipe, at least paths to become a hub for start-ups.

0*STindQ5-Serw7lGW.
Image borrowed from Zak Slayback

Here are some excerpts that show that everything is cultural so that a city or a university should have above all a friendly and liberal, not to say laissez-faire attitude. “And it’s not as if you have to make painful sacrifices in the meantime. Think about what I’ve suggested you should do. Encourage local restaurants, save old buildings, take advantage of density, make CMU the best, promote tolerance. These are the things that make Pittsburgh good to live in now. All I’m saying is that you should do even more of them.”

And about universities, he adds: “What can CMU do to help Pittsburgh become a startup hub? Be an even better research university. […] Being that kind of talent magnet is the most important contribution universities can make toward making their city a startup hub. In fact it is practically the only contribution they can make. But wait, shouldn’t universities be setting up programs with words like “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” in their names? No, they should not. These kind of things almost always turn out to be disappointments. They’re pursuing the wrong targets. […] And the way to learn about entrepreneurship is to do it, which you can’t in school. I know it may disappoint some administrators to hear that the best thing a university can do to encourage startups is to be a great university. It’s like telling people who want to lose weight that the way to do it is to eat less. […] Universities are great at bringing together founders, but beyond that the best thing they can do is get out of the way. For example, by not claiming ownership of “intellectual property” that students and faculty develop, and by having liberal rules about deferred admission and leaves of absence. […] But if a university really wanted to help its students start startups, the empirical evidence […] suggests the best thing they can do is literally nothing.”

And now a diggression. This article reminded me of the text of another genius of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs. “[There are] two or three reasons. You have to go back a little in history. I mean this is where the beatnik happened in San Francisco. It is a pretty interesting thing. This is where the hippy movement happened. This is the only place in America where Rock‘n’roll really happened. Right? Most of the bands in this country, Bob Dylan in the 60’s, I mean they all came out of here. I think of Joan Baez to Jefferson Airplane to the Grateful Dead. Everything came out of here, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, everybody. Why is that? You’ve also had Stanford and Berkeley, two awesome universities drawing smart people from all over the world and depositing them in this clean, sunny, nice place where there’s a whole bunch of other smart people and pretty good food. And at times a lot of drugs and all of that. So they stayed. There’s a lot of human capital pouring in. Really smart people. People seem pretty bright here relative to the rest of the country. People seem pretty open-minded here relative to the rest of the country. I think it’s just a very unique place and it’s got a track record to prove it and that tends to attract more people. I give a lot of credit to the universities, probably the most credit of anything to Stanford and Berkeley.”

Paul Graham’s latest contribution is a must read. As usual, it is long, provocative, disturbing and totally convincing…

Immigrants and Unicorns

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Thanks to the a16z weekly newsletter, I just discovered another interesting study about the importance of migrants in the US innovation landscape: Immigrants and the Billion Dollar Startups (in pdf). Here are some key findings:
– 51 percent, or 44 out of 87, of the country’s $1 billion startup companies had at least one immigrant founder.
– 62 of the 87 companies, or 71 percent, had at least one immigrant helping the company grow and innovate.
– immigrant founders have created an average of approximately 760 jobs per company in the United States.
Of course this is limited to the Unicorns, private companies with a rather young history, but these are impressive data.

Immigrants and Billion Dollar Startups

If you have never read anything about the importance of migrants in Silicon Valley, you might also be interested in the work of AnnaLee Saxenian. Now, I copied the data from the study, to add my own comments:

Unicorns_and_migrants

In terms of geography, out of the 44 start-ups, 14 are based in Silicon Valley and 12 in close-by San Francisco.
In terms of education, out of the 60 immigrant founders, 23 have studied in the US universities, including 5 at Stanford and 1 at Berkeley vs. 4 at Harvard and 2 at MIT.
In terms of origin, the study gives the individual countries and I was interested at Europe: 15 come from the European Union vs. 14 from India and 7 from Israel.
Interesting, right?

Is Silicon Valley crazy (again)?

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I regularly go back to my “second home” trying to discover if Silicon Valley has to tell us anything new. This time, I came back a little more confused than after my previous journeys. The region remains the center of entrepreneurship and high-tech innovation, but it seems to touch the limits of madness. Everything goes too fast (except the automobile traffic which is nearly always congested), everything is too expensive, and many are hoping for a crisis to return to a normal situation. Certainly the craziest projects are funded and it is difficult to say what they will become (SpaceX and Tesla of course, but what about MagicLeap or explorations of Google and others in artificial intelligence and augmented human?)

But connoisseurs of Silicon Valley are worried too. So is Michael Malone in Of Microchips and Men: A Conversation About Intel, published in the New Yorker for his new book The Intel Trinity: “The most interesting phenomenon of the last three or four years is that big, successful Valley companies like Facebook and Google and Apple are so flush with cash that the game is now, you build yourself to a certain size and look to be bought. Look at Mark Zuckerberg. He buys Instagram and then he buys WhatsApp. He spends nineteen billion dollars for WhatsApp. That’s a mind-boggling number for a startup. For the first time, acquisitions are more appealing than I.P.O.s. So we are going into this interesting era where maybe companies will choose not to go public anymore, which was always the big-money exit strategy, and instead go do a fan dance in front of Mark Zuckerberg in hopes of getting these insane valuations. What’s your take on the worldly ambitions of the new tech companies? I’m a little bothered by the hypocrisy exhibited by the new generation of Silicon Valley leaders. They’re code writers, and software is different from hardware. With software people, there is this big, romantic philosophy—“Do no evil”—yet it’s always combined with a sort of duplicity. These guys who are running the social-networking era, they’re really behaving like oligarchs: “You know the reason we’re successful is that we’re special. We’re smarter than other people.” You didn’t see that in the early generation of Silicon Valley leaders. They were the children of blue-collar working families. They worked with their hands. So they didn’t try to be your whole world. They didn’t build a campus for you to live on twenty-four hours a day, like in a dorm. They expected you to go home to your family. They had an admiration for working people. You just don’t see that right now with the social-networking guys. Average folks in the Valley, especially poor people, have a really strong sense that these guys don’t care about them. And I think it manifests itself in all sorts of ways, like working with the N.S.A., and the perpetual effort to monetize our private information. It’s a very different world.”

There was also an interesting oral exchange between between George Packer and Ken Auletta, two other connoisseurs of Silicon Valley, although it’s been two years ago: George Packer and Ken Auletta on Silicon Valley.

Packer-Auletta

At the anecdote level, I retained the following from my trip:
– Venture capital is changing due to the departure of former generations and they no longer fund the traditional areas of the semiconductor or hardware, too risky at the product level, nor even the cleantech / greentech (which were not just another bubble). Only corporations fund innovation in these sectors,
– Accelerators are primarily a source of new projects and talents for investors, not necessarily a better model for entrepreneurs,
– Entrepreneurs are stressed by costs and competition that leads to overbidding,
– As a result, the region is saturated, also because its center of gravity moved to San Francisco
– Therefore my belief (still strong) that we need to know the dynamics of this region to innovate and engage in high-tech is modulated by all these constraints and there is probably an opportunity to attract talent, projects and small and large high-tech companies in Europe …

SV_2016

So will there be a lot of damage as predicted by the Guardian in Silicon Valley braces it self for a fall ‘There’ll be a lot of blood.’? Or do we make the same mistake as AnnaLee Saexnian: “In 1979, I was a graduate student at Berkeley and I was one of the first scholars to study Silicon Valley. I culminated my master’s program by writing a thesis in which I confidently predicted that Silicon Valley would stop growing. I argued that housing and labor were too expensive and the roads were too congested, and while corporate headquarters and research might remain, I was convinced that the region had reached its physical limits and that innovation and job growth would occur elsewhere during the 1980s. As it turns out I was wrong.” (Source: A climate for Entrepreneurship – 1999)

PS: a shot addition (dated February 12, 2016) about the craziness of unicorns. Just have a look at the nice infographics below…

bulle-internet-licornes-dragons
Source: Licornes et dragons font resurgir le spectre d’une bulle Internet

When Entrepreneurship Meets Street Art

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From time to time, I post articles not related to start-ups and entrepreneurship, but to other topics such as Street Art for example. Now comes the opportunity to join both thanks to Banksy. Indeed I can even relate both to migrants (who are a critical component of entrepreneurship). Banksy recently created the following Street Art work:

jobs_02-932x525

648x415_uvre-banksy-pres-jungle-calais

Banksy explained: “We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources, but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple is the world’s most profitable company, it pays over $7 billion a year in taxes—and it only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.” Do I need to add about the importance of migrants in high-tech entrepreneurship? If yes, just read again AnnaLee Saxenian, Migration, Silicon Valley, and Entrepreneurship.

Why doesn’t Europe create any Google or Apple?

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This is my latest contribution to Entreprise Romande. In the middle of my accounts of In the Plex, I think it is an interesting coincidence. React if you wish…

ER-Aout2015-EuropeanGoogle

Why did not Europe create Apple, Google or Tesla? Or should we say, why don’t we have Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Elon Musk on the old continent? Innovation is complex and success comes only as an unlikely alignment of planets that are a product, a market, founders and a team they have managed to assemble, capital, and even a favorable macroeconomic situation. Also we cannot ignore in the success of a start-up, the luck factor involved in this unlikely combination.

The recent and great biography of Elon Musk [1], the founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX describes in an exemplary manner how a migrant from South African origin, who could have been a very brilliant student, took risky decisions with a nearly inhuman focus to build businesses that might change the world. We must of course be wary of the myth of the superman that Silicon Valley tends to highlight. All the success of the new Steve Jobs will depend upon a favorable and highly efficient environment. But why Europe and Switzerland create so rarely similar “role models”? We have of course Richard Branson or the Hayek dynasty and recent analyzes show that Europe has its “unicorns” [2] but the comparison shows a “shy” Europe. So why?

The serious and competent analyst will explain the multiple benefits of the United States: a discreet but substantial public R&D, particularly in the military field, a highly efficient capital market, a homogeneous and sometimes protectionist market, and a devilishly aggressive policy and economy at the limit of imperialism. But the pessimist pamphleteer may also see an aging (precisely) old continent where migrants are seen as a threat – whereas they are the lifeblood of Silicon Valley – and more seriously a lack of ambition of youth, encouraged by a society with dreams dying off.

The roots of our weakness are deep. We say to a young graduate still full of dreams to go and learn from the private sector to acquire skills and experience. But is there any European company with dreams of electric vehicles and interplanetary travel? Worse, we say to the children first and foremost to integrate well and we forget to let them dream further. The school does not encourage the crazy adventures and in this environment dreamers quickly fall from the stars on dry land.

Five EPFL start-ups have recently been sold (Sensima, Jilion, Lemoptix, Composyt and Aïmago) to the satisfaction of their founders and many others will be delighted to build strong SMEs with fifty employees or so. But when I tell them that in the United States their counterparts dream of changing the world, they look at me with a funny look. They tell me as their investors that we are not on the same planet and that the German and Swiss model of SMEs is a beautiful alternative. The ambition is seen as arrogance and an engineer does not like uncertainty or risk of failure.

So much unnecessary suffering for the rare exceptions. Some of them face advisors or investors, sometimes incompetent, mostly benign but having references only to our modest success. “Prove that your first model can work here.” “Do not go looking for too much money.” “You’ll lose control and you’ll be replaced.” Not to mention the finicky reading of business plan. Everyone should know that they are only the expression of a vision. To the point that I sometimes advise them to leave if they are ready to do so …

I will remain optimistic because Skype and Spotify are recent encouraging counter-examples and Europe took the measure of the threat, I think. I will mostly remain optimistic because entrepreneurship is a matter of exceptions and I meet young people who still have some dreams. But please, do not turn them off!

[1] Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Future Fantastic Ashley Vance; Ecco – May 2015.
[2] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-16/europe-s-tech-unicorns-are-so-tame

Startup Land : the Zendesk adventure from Denmark to Silicon Valley to IPO

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Many of my friends and colleagues tell me that video and movies are nowadays better than books for documenting real life. I still feel there is in books a depth I do not find anywhere else. A question of generations, probably. HBO’s Silicon Valley may be a funny and close-to-reality account of what high-tech entrepreneurship is but Startup Land is a great example of why I still prefer books. I did not find everything I was looking for – and I will give one example below – but I could feel the authenticity and even the emotion from Mikkel Svane’s account of what building a start-up and a product means. So let me share with you a few lessons from Startup Land.

Startup-Land-the-book

The motivation to start

“We felt that we needed to make a change before it was too late. We all know that people grow more risk-averse over time. As we start to have houses and mortgages, and kids and cars, and schools and institutions, we start to settle. We invest a lot of time in relationships with friends and neighbors, and making big moves becomes harder. We become less and less willing to just flush everything down the drain and start all over.” [Page 1]

No recipe

“Along the way, I’ll share the unconventional advice you learn only in the trenches. I am allergic to pat business advice that aims to give some formula for success. I’ve learned there is no formula for success; the world moves too fast for any formula to last, and people are far too creative—always iterating and finding a better way.” [Page 6]

About failure

In Silicon Valley there’s a lot of talk about failure—there’s almost a celebration of failure. People recite mantras about “failing fast,” and successful people are always ready to tell you what they learned from their failures, claiming they wouldn’t be where they are today without their previous spectacular mess-ups. To me, having experienced the disappointment that comes with failure, all this cheer is a little odd. The truth is, in my experience, failure is a terrible thing. Not being able to pay your bills is a terrible thing. Letting people go and disappointing them and their families is a terrible thing. Not delivering on your promises to customers who believed in you is a terrible thing. Sure, you learn from these ordeals, but there is nothing positive about the failure that led you there. I learned there is an important distinction between promoting a culture that doesn’t make people afraid of making and admitting mistakes, and having a culture that says failure is great. Failure is not something to be proud of. But failure is something you can recover from. [Pages 15-16]

There are other nice thoughts about “boring is beautiful” [page 23], “working from home” [page 34], “money isn’t only in your bank account, it’s also in your head” [page 35], and an “unconventional (possibly illegal) hiring checklist” [page 127]

I will quote Svane about investors [page 61]: “I learned an important lesson in this experience – one that influenced all of the investor decision we’ve made since then. There is a vast spectrum of investors. Professional investors are extremely aware of the fact that they will be successful only if everyone else is successful. Great investors have unique relationships with founders, and they are dedicated to growing the company the right way. Mediocre and bad investors work around founders, and the company end in disaster. The problem is, early on many startups have few options, and they have to deal with amateur investors who are shortsighted and concerned with optimizing their own position.” [and page 93]: “Good investors understand that the founding team often is what carries the spirit of a company and makes it what it is.”

And about growth [page 74]: “Even after the seed round with Christoph Janz, we were still looking for investors. If you’ve never been in a startup this may seem odd, but when you’re a startup founder you’re basically always fund-raising. Building a company costs money, and the faster you grow, the more cash it requires. Of course, that’s not the case for all startups – there are definitely examples of companies that have come a long way on their own positive cash flow – but the general rule is that if you optimize for profitability, you sacrifice growth. And for a startup, it’s all about growth.”

In May 2014, Zendesk went public and the team was so extatic, many pictures were tweeted! The company raised $100M at $8 per share. They had a secondary offering at $22.75 raising more than $160M for the company. In 2014, Zendesk revenue was $127M!… and its loss $67M.

Zendesk-IPO

There was one piece of information I never found neither in Startup Land nor in the IPO filings: Zendesk has three founders, Mikkel Svane, CEO and author of the book. Alexander Aghassipour, Chief Product Officer and Morten Primdahl, CTO. I am a fan of cap. tables (as you may know or can see here in Equity split in 305 high-tech start-ups with founders, employees and investors shares) and in particular studying how founders share equity at company foundation. But there is no information about Primdahl ‘s stock. I only have one explanation: On page 37, Svane writes: “the thing about money is, it’s happening in your head. Everyone processes it differently. Aghassipour adnSvane could live with no salary in the early days of Zendesk, but Primdahl could not. It’s possibly he had a salary against less stock. I would love to learn from Savne if I am right or wrong!

Zendesk-captable
Click on picture to enlarge

Europe and Start-ups : should we worry? Or is there hope?

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I just read two articles (thanks Kevin and Deborah 🙂 !) about high-tech entrepreneurship in Europe. One is optimistic, the other one less so… The Financial Times just published a special report about Europe’s top 50 tech entrepreneurs and it includes Watch out Silicon Valley by Skype’s co-founder Niklas Zennström. The new York Times published A Fearless Culture Fuels U.S. Tech Giants. You might not be surprised but I mostly agreed with the American point of view. So let me begin with the pessimistic analysis…

Here’s a stark comparison: In the United States, three of the top 10 companies by market capitalization are technology companies founded in the last half-century: Apple, Microsoft and Google. In Europe, there are none among the top 10 and when it comes to remedies: “They all want a Silicon Valley,” [said] Jacob Kirkegaard, a Danish economist […] “But none of them can match the scale and focus on the new and truly innovative technologies you have in the United States. Europe and the rest of the world are playing catch-up, to the great frustration of policy makers there. The article adds: “while there are always individual exceptions to sweeping generalities about Europeans and Americans, the major barriers were cultural.” […] “Fail fast, fail often” is a Silicon Valley mantra, and the freedom to innovate is inextricably linked to the freedom to fail. In Europe, failure carries a much greater stigma than it does in the United States. […] None of this will be easy to change, even assuming Europeans want change.

Zennström is much more optimistic and I would love to agree with him… “Just as a nimble start-up can defeat a large incumbent, turning its focus and speed to its advantage, so too are we seeing that in some respects European entrepreneurs actually have an edge. The first of these advantages is highly visible: the extraordinary development of Europe’s tech hubs.” He mentions here Helsinki for mobile gaming and London for finance. He sees a second reason why Silicon Valley might be less needed. “When we founded Skype, our aim was never to build the best peer-to-peer communication service in Sweden. Likewise, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon did not set out to build Sweden’s best music service with Spotify, nor did Riccardo Zacconi and his co-founders at King aim to build amazing games for Swedes to play with. Without the luxury of a huge domestic market, we were forced to think internationally from day one — to solve global problems, to work across borders, and to move fast in doing so.” […] “In short, we are seeing the emergence of a remarkable cohort of new businesses: start-ups that begin in some of the world’s smallest domestic markets but are able, thanks to their highly international approach, to reach global scale in record time. In time, I believe, this will be as significant a trend as the historic concentration of innovation in Silicon Valley, and will play a major role in the European economy for decades to come.”

I feel like I read the same analysis from fifteen or twenty years…Just have a look, even if more recent, at Europe vs. USA: growth in IT and Biotech Only time will tell us who best analyzed the situation.

We must create a Google in Europe

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The self-citation is a delicate exercise but as it does not happen often that I give my point of view in the media, I guess this is acceptable… Newspaper Le Temps asked for my point of view related to the recent acquisitions of EPFL spin-offs. I extract some messages.

Imprimer

What worries me is that in Europe, I have never seen the birth of technology companies like Google, Apple or Cisco.

– Yet there is SAP in Germany or Internet service Skype…

– Yes, but [forgetting SAP] there was no big success in Europe in technology in the last fifty years. Microsoft has bought Skype for $8.5 billion and Logitech is worth $2B on the stock market with 6,000 employees. But in the United States, industry heavyweights are valued at over $170 billion and have more than 50,000 employees. There is a difference of a factor ten between the two continents and this has been disturbing me for over twenty-five years. I have doubts and fears about the future of Europe.

– How do you explain this difference?

– I think this is essentially cultural. A young engineer who listens to her parents will work with Nestlé and Novartis, and then remains there. Americans have parents or grandparents who were immigrants. The tradition of moving is digested and failure is accepted.

– What are the risks of such a situation?

– If it does not renew, it is the death of Europe. We are almost there, look at France. This is a concern I have for my two children. We must create a Google in Europe for the economy to evolve. Without the presence of a major technology group, innovative start-ups will be systematically acquired by American groups. Yahoo! bought French start-up Kelkoo, Danish Navision now belongs to Microsoft, the Swedish MySQL to Oracle and French ILOG to IBM.

For the spin-offs of EPFL, it is the same. Medical imaging company Aïmago was acquired by Novadaq Technologies for $10 million. Sensima Technology, active in the production of magnetic sensors, has been integrated in Monolithic Power Systems (MPS) based in San Jose, California. Only Jilion was bought by the French Dailymotion, which integrated their video technology on their site. And now it’s Intel. And when these companies are acquired, it’s expertise and jobs that may disappear. There is a risk of loss of wealth.

The rest of the article is available on Le Temps website.