Tag Archives: Entrepreneur

Are VCs arrogant?

This was the question asked by Fred Destin in his blog post last December: The Arrogant VC: A View From the Trenches

I am interested in the topic because I see more and more entrepreneurs who just do not want to face VCs. I think it is a mistake as you may not find adequate resources for your ventures, but it is a real debate.

Destin puts in bold the following arguments:
– behaved in a rude and disrespectful manner
– absence of feedback loop
– lack of empathy
– VCs tend to string along entrepreneurs forever
– vague on their decision and engagement process
– the entrepreneur comes away feeling like he was played
– seeing everything through the lens of money
– out of touch with the reality of entrepreneurs
– VCs really don’t take any personal risk but expect everyone else to…
– dubious practices
and as a conclusion Choose your VC’s with care. Good ones transform your business, bad ones wreck it

I have read this many times, seen it sometimes but not so often. So let me add my piece, taken from my readings. You will find on this blog accounts of books I really recommend, such as Founders at Work, Betting it All, In the Company of Giants. I just extracted comments on investors from these books. I think they are more balanced and as Destin wrote, choose your VCs with care. Here they are:

– Great as long as all goes well.
– Learn about them and their lack of transparency
– Best motivation is not to need investors
– Know people and speak their language
– You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them
– Avoid it if you can
– VCs are politer than others, they rarely say no…
– Bad behaviors on all sides, “We’re interested in you guys because of your management team; we think you’re fantastic … Two weeks later they pull me into the office—before even the first board meeting—and say, “We want to replace you as CEO.”
– When company became popular, VCs knocked at the door
– Move from the ego, “me” to the company, “we”, the shareholders
– Met 43… and a lengthy process; Then once you’ve received a term sheet, then the VCs get interested, and then acquirers get interested. They all told me $18 million wasn’t interesting. And I’d say, “But most people will tell you $50 million, and you know they’re lying. I’m already discounting it because I’m a venture guy just like you are.” And they’d say, “Yeah, but $18 million just isn’t interesting.” So I changed my spreadsheet to say $50 million. And they said, “OK, that’s pretty interesting.”
– We’re also overly paranoid because the first thing we did when we started the company was talk to a bunch of entrepreneurs who told us, “Don’t tell anyone what you are doing. VCs are sharks.” Meanwhile, you hear from the VCs, “You’re too paranoid.” So it’s hard to find the right balance and be human, because you don’t know who’s genuine and who’s not.
– Within venture capital, you don’t want to manage what they call the “living dead.” Their rules of thumb were: typically one out of ten companies is a really big hit; roughly three out of ten go belly up pretty quickly, and you get rid of them. The other five to six are what they call the “living dead.” They grow nicely, organically, but don’t generate spectacular returns, and they take management time and energy.
– The venture capitalists at least in those days, had a terrible track record of bringing people in and then throwing the entrepreneur out.
– We didn’t take any salaries. but we held off on the VCs. We wanted the discipline. Not being paid and having uncertainty of having no safety net is a great motivator.
– It serves an enormous service in the business, in financing companies, in providing leadership, and connections. But we did not need their money or the leadership.
– I learnt something about raising money. They need us as much as we need them.
– I tried to get venture capital money, to no avail. What people don’t understand is that innovation is the hardest thing in the world to fund. I was 28 years old and this was before it was good to be a 28-year-old entrepreneur.
– In the old days, venture capitalists helped a company a lot. They were mentors. Many just bring money today.
– [To raise money,] go with the best venture capitalists and give them more equity. I’ll take a worse deal from Kleiner. They have people like John Doerr. You can’t put into words what that makes.
– We did a lot of market research, studied the customer, understood the problems. We couldn’t even get second meetings [with venture capitalists]. We had no industry experience and at the time VCs did not invest in consumer products.
– I did not have any venture capitalist which was good news and bad news. I could make every mistake, it was my neck, and probably no VC would have given me money: I was a woman, it was software at the time software had no value.
– In 83, I used the board to get some experienced business people. We got Dave Marquardt, a venture capitalist who bought 5% of the company for $1M.
– The downside to venture guys is that they sometimes think they know more than they do about what’s best for your company. They don’t want to admit when they make mistakes

Start-Up, the book: a visual summary

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Start-Up, what we may still learn from Silicon Valley is two years old. I still make presentations of it and I hope to share my passion about this world.

By clicking on the picture below, you can download an extensive presentation inspired from others made in places such as Paris, Barcelona, Stockholm, Marseille, Antwerpen, Geneva… It’s never easy to follow slides without any comment, but I hope you will enjoy some of them… have fun and contact me if they are not clear!

Women and High-Tech Entrepreneurship.

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Here is my third contribution to Créateurs, the Geneva newsletter, where I have been asked to write short articles about famous success stories. After Adobe and Genentech, here are some thoughts about women and high-tech entrepreneurship.

Women Entrepreneurs? Carol Bartz, Sandy Kurtzig…

… but also Ann Winblad, Catarina Fake, Kim Polese, Candice Carpenter, Mena Trott.
The list may go on but would not be much longer. Why so few women in high-tech entrepreneurship? And even worse, why are they so little known? The answer is simple: the situation is just an illustration of their position in science, in high-level positions in companies or in society more generally. A few anecdotes will show however that they have nothing to prove their male counterparts.

Sandy Kurtzig is a school dropout. She stopped the PhD program she was following at Stanford University and joined General Electric. She discovered there that computer science must help in improving manufacturing (such as in inventory management or logistics) and left again to found Ask Computer in 1972 with $2’000 from her own savings. “No venture capitalist would have given me money in the beginning. First software was seen of no value and then I was a woman.” She declined an acquisition offer from Hewlett-Packard in 1976 and in 1981 Ask Computer went public on Nasdaq. (The reader should remember that Apple had gone public in December 1980 and Logitech was founded in January 1981.) When she left Ask in 1989, the company had $189M in sales. Her advice to entrepreneurs? Believe in yourself, hire the right people and share success. Do not be afraid of making mistakes.

Carol Bartz also began her career in a big company: 3M is the inventor of the famous post-it. She heard there: “you are a woman, what are you doing here?” She left the company when he understood she would not be promoted because she was a woman. A few years later, she moved to Silicon Valley. “Even in this region, being a woman is belonging to a minority.” Her comment will not prevent her from becoming CEO of Autodesk in 1992. (Autodesk is the world leader for 3D software for architecture and mechanical design with $2B in sales in 2008.) That same year, in 1992, she was diagnosed with cancer. She will have chemotherapy while managing her company. She succeeded twice. “With private life and work, you do not have time to wonder if you are all right or not.” Work was a distraction and the leadership she showed was a strong motivation for her colleagues.

She is also fighting for the position of women in science: “I sincerely believe that women are dissuaded [from doing science]. They are told it is not important. Another female entrepreneur, Ann Winblad adds: “The daughter of a friend of mine is worried about appearing too nerdy if she invests in science. However some of the successful women – myself, Carol Bartz – all of us were math whizzes and we really had fun teenage lives as well as adult lives and have been very successful. The problem is that we need role models like Steve Jobs with this inspirational product, the iPod. Something is getting lost in the message because not many say I want to be like them.”

In January 2009, Carol Bartz became Yahoo’s CEO. The task may not be easy. Should we listen to Caratina Fake, founder of Flickr: « There is a lot of institutionalized sexism working against women in business and I think that people aren’t even aware that it’s there. » This post is unfortunately too short to celebrate women as entrepreneurs- Those who succeeded had to be exceptional and those who try also, without any doubt. The barriers entrepreneurs face are amplified for women. I will just conclude by copying the poet in saying that, in the start-up world maybe “Women are the Future of Men”.

To know more:
Carol Bartz in “Betting It All” by Michael Malone (Wiley, 2002).
Sandy Kurtzig in “In the Company of Giants” by R. Dev Jager and R. Ortiz (McGraw Hill, 1997)

Next article: A European in Silicon Valley, Aart de Geus.

The Art of Selling

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I have never be good at sales. I am not sure why, but it requires either qualities or experience I do not have. Selling the book Start-Up was a good example! So when I had to organize a workshop on sales, I checked a few things including the following videos which I found interesting. Some are GREAT!

Steve Blank Engineers and Founders: The First Sales Team

Frank Levison Real Sales and Customers in Business

Just in case you missed the point: Businesses Must Have Customers

Dan Spinger: Negotiating with Customers and Clients

Guy Kawasaki Seed the Clouds and Watch the Sales Grow

Randy Komisar Exploring New Sales and Marketing Channels

Tina Seelig Classroom Experiments in Entrepreneurship

Last but not least, even if not really politically correct

Bob Parson : Build 3 Mega Million $$$ businesses

The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur

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A new report has been published thanks to the Kauffman foundation. The study, entitled “The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur,” led by co-authors Vivek Wadhwa, Raj Aggarwal, Krisztina “Z” Holly, and Alex Salkever gives very interesting features about the background and motivations of entrepreneurs.

The paper can be found on the Kauffman foundation web site and here are some key lessons:

– founders are generally well-educated, middle class; they have a family and experience. So this kills a little the school drop-out, young, nerdy entrepreneur…

They do not always or often think about becoming an entrepreneur early in their life:

Another interesting element is about role model or mentor:

Now, when the study focuses on young entrepreneurs, the view is slightly different:

It is where the Yahoo, Google founders come in the picture probably.

Finally, there are many serial entrepreneurs. I am a little surprised because I am not sure succesful entrepreneurs are necessarily serial entrepreneurs. In any this would not contradict the findings and this is interesting:

If there is one thing I want to add, it is about the definition of “founder” that the authors have used:

a “founder” was “an early employee, who typically joined the company in its first year, before the company developed its products and perfected its business model.”

Depending on how many of these founders were employees rather than entrepreneurs may have an impact on the data which are provided here. A well-funded VC-backed company may attract in its first year very experienced people who are not necessarily entrepreneurs. But this being said, all this is of real interest.

Bob Swanson & Herbert Boyer: Genentech

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Here is my second contribution to Créateurs, the Geneva newsletter, where I have been asked to write short articles about famous success stories. I began last quarter with Adobe and its founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke, here is now Bob Swanson, Herbert Boyer, founders of Genentech.

Bob Swanson and Herbert Boyer: Genentech

In the start-up world, biotechnologies do not seem to belong to the same world: they seem to always be reserved to high-caliber scientists not to say Nobel prize winners that investors would back with their money. So… where is the entrepreneur?

The story about the Genentech beginnings is probably the best illustration that a visionary entrepreneur is also necessary in biotechnologies. Much more than just a start-up, it is an entire industry that Bob Swanson founded.

The legend says that Bob Swanson, a 29-year old venture capitalist, met Herbert Boyer, a professor at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF). The money of Bob and the ideas of Herbert made possible the creation of Genentech in 1976, followed by its IPO in 1980. The story deserves however a little more attention. Bob Swanson was not really an investor. He is an entrepreneur. he has been hired by Kleiner and Perkins (KP) who had understood that the real value of a venture capital firm is to create company and not only to fund them. They understood this after the success of Tandem and Jimmy Treybig whom they financed from day 1 in 1974. (See KP first fund).

Bob Swanson is fascinated by the potential of biology and genetics. (He has a BS in chemistry from MIT and an MBA). After helping KP for one their portfolio company, he leaves the fund to dedicate himself to his new passion. He meets many professors in the Bay Area but all of them explain him that their work is about science, leading edge science for sure and very far from commercial applications.

Herbert Boyer is not a typical professor. Together with Stanley Cohen, he is the inventor of a patented technology, which was not common in the academic world of the seventies. Known as the Cohen-Boyer patent, it describes how to manipulate the DNA and it is so fundamental that any new technology in the field needs to use this patent, which means obtaining a license on the technology and paying royalties to its owners, Stanford University and UCSF. In total, more than $250M was generated in royalties over 20 years.

The beginnings of Genentech are a combination of history and legend. Swanson calls Boyer who tells him he is very busy but he agrees on a 10-minute talk on a Friday afternoon. Swanson is obsessed about one single thing: the applications of research. Boyer replies that there is certainly some potential but it will require another 10 years of research. “Why, why, why?” Swanson does not stop saying to the point that Boyer finally concludes “why not? May be it can be faster.” The 10-minute talk has become a 3-hour discussion. Genentech is born, at least in two minds full of beer!

They still have to convince the skeptics. Among them, the potential investors. A week later, Tom Perkins meets with the two men and he remembers: “the technical risks were huge. I was very skeptical. I did not know anything in biology.” Kleiner is however very impressed by the energy of Swanson and the expertise of Boyer. He decides to try, step by step in order to diminish the risks and minimize the initial investment. Kleiner invests $100’000 which will last nine months.

The rest is History. Genentech synthesizes insulin in 1978 and growth hormone in 1979. Genentech also raised $10M with private investors before going public on Nasdaq in 1980. For the first time, a biotech company goes public with no revenue and its first product is not approved yet (it will be in 1985 only). In 1990, Roche and Genentech will sign a strategic partnership which makes the Swiss company its major shareholder. In 2009, Roche acquired all the remaining shares of Genentech.

Swanson was not an investor, but a visionary entrepreneur. Boyer was not a professor in his ivory tower. They were also lucky to have the best of mentors, Tom Kleiner. A lot of energy and passion, great ideas, some money. It is an almost accidental meeting which is responsible for the growth of a industry worth tens of billions of dollars.

Icing on the cake, the Genentech capitalization table at its IPO:

Pour en savoir plus:

Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=genentech

The Genentech web site:
http://www.gene.com

Next quarter: Women entrepreneurs, Carol Batz and Sandy Kurtzig

Entrepreneurs and Revolutions

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Nicolas Hayek, founder of Swatch, was yesterday at the Forum des 100.

He talked about the Economic crisis and called for an “International of Entrepreneurs”! His talk was in French and can be found here.

Ironically, in my book , I had quoted Pitch Johnson on a similar topic: “Entrepreneurs are the revolutionaries of our time.” And he had added: “Democracy works best when there is this kind of turbulence in the society, when those not well-off have a chance to climb the economic ladder by using brains, energy and skills to create new markets or serve existing markets better then their old competitors”

So should I conclude with “Entrepreneurs of the World, Unite!”

The question was also discussed in a very interesting debate between Emmanuel Todd and Pascal Couchepin (in French again).

A success story: Adobe Systems – John Warnock and Charles Geschke

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Créateurs, a local newsletter asked me to write short articles about famous success stories. I decided to begin with Adobe and its founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke. You will find the full text below as well as the usual data I like to give about start-ups: the capitalisation table of the company at its IPO and how shareholding evolved from foundation to public offering. Here is the article you may found in french in the Newsletter.

John Warnock and Charles Geschke: Adobe

Start-ups are very often associated to their founders. Entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates are obviously linked to the company they created. John Warnock and Charles Geschke may be less famous but their story is as fascinating.

Without the profile of the atypical entrepreneur (they are not “school dropouts” who launched their venture in their twenties), Warnock and Geschke founded Adobe Systems in 1982 when they were more than 40-year-old. Adobe is famous for some of the most popular software worldwide such as Acrobat and Photoshop.

From the printer to the printing protocol
It all began in the 70’s, at the renowned Palo Alto Research Park of Xerox, the vendor of copy machines. The two engineers are more and more frustrated. Xerox may have enabled the development of the computer mouse, word processing, email or Ethernet, but it has been incapable of transforming them in commercial products. Warnock and Geschke cannot convince their management of the potential of their research. “Part of it was fear and misunderstanding” but they also admit that “in fairness to the management, I think we as researchers were a little naïve about what it would take to get these things from conceptual operating prototypes all the way to full-production, supportable products. But we sort of hoped that they would hire the people who could do that.”

They left Xerox in 1982 and raised $2.5M to develop their project: high quality printers and a system which connect them to computer networks. When they met potential customers (Apple, Dec), they discovered that nobody is really interested. Steve Jobs explains to them that he needs their printer protocol, Postscript, for the Macintosh he is developing. They immediately change their business plan. Adobe became a software company with the success we all know.

Some good advice
Their vision of what is an entrepreneur is enlightening. It was more an accident than a destiny. But today their advice is worth reading.

You should always be flexible. You should try and explore many solutions, test them with customers and abandon the wrong ones very fast. They have the same views on the personality of entrepreneurs: “99% of founders fail because they cannot change and want to control too much”.

Passion, risk taking and self-confidence seem to be the critical strengths of entrepreneurs combined with intelligence and hard work. “But this is not sufficient. Luck also plays a major role.

When their age and experience is mentioned, Geschke adds that “I don’t think there’s any mystery in running a business. I think it helped that we were in our 40s, that we had worked for a variety of organizations. We had worked in other companies, but tried to leave their bad ideas as proprietary to them. We tried to pick the best things that we saw.” What is essential is to have a vision of what you want to do. “I am not a hunter, never have fired a gun, but I’m told that if you want to shoot a duck, you have to shoot where the duck is going to be, not where the duck is. It’s the same with introducing technology: if you’re only focused on the
market today, by the time you introduce your solution to that problem, there’ll probably be several others already entrenched.”

The ingredients of success
From the initial frustration which is at the origin of their departure from Xerox to the success of Adobe, the lessons are many. Never be a one-product company; technology cannot be simply transferred, you need to add brain power, hire good professionals; and as founders, you need to have “the intellectual capability, inherent honesty, ethical behavior and principles by which we lead [your] personal and business lives.”

In a few sentences, the ingredients of success are numerous, complex as well as simple and probably common to all great entrepreneurs.

To know more about Adobe:
The Revolutionaries: www.thetech.org/exhibits/online/revolution
Adobe Systems, Computer History Museum: www.computerhistory.org
Founders at Work, J. Livingston, Apress (2007)
In the company of Giants, R. Jager and R. Ortiz, Mcgraw-Hill (1997)

Next Article: Bob Swanson: Genentech

Now the cap. table in 1986

and the shareholding structure from 1982 to 1986:

Carol Bartz and Yahoo

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Carol Bartz is an exceptional woman. The new Yahoo CEO had given an interview in 2002 that you can read in the book Betting It All. Author Michael Malone described her two passions: Fight Cancer and Girls and Math: “Girls in general have no interest for math. I think that in fact they are dissuaded.” On the more general topic of women and technology/business, she added: “I left 3M because I could not evolve just because I was a woman. […] You are a woman, what are you doing here?” and she also said: “But being a woman in Silicon Valley is to be part of a minority”. The topic of woman in technology is seldom and clearly not enough developed.

Carol Bartz is also amazingly energetic : “I was still running my company while I was having my chemotherapy”.

Finally among the ingredients required for entrepreneurs, she quotes uncertainty that you have to be ready to accept. “Facing the many jobs I took, I was not comfortable because I was wondeing if I was the best for it.” But she also added: “if you cannot make it, you just have to go across the street and try with someone else… which is always possible in Silicon Valley.”

The Ultimate Cure, a great novel

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Not only is The Ultimate Cure a good novel which describes the start-up life, the venture capitalists and what it costs to be an entrepreneur (and it reminds me of Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest) but it is also a great novel, about human nature and what drives us in life. Here it reminds me of Swiss rising star, Martin Suter and his psychological thrillers. Most importantly, it is a great pleasure to read.

Author Peter Harboe-Schmidt has done a really nice “oeuvre”. Here is just a small piece:

“Take your start-up as an example. Why did you do it? If you analyzed the pros and cons for doing a start-up, you’d probably never do it. But your gut feeling pushed you on, knowing that you would get something very valuable out of it. Am I right?”
Martin speculated on why he was so drawn to a world that at times could appear to be no more than sheer madness. Like a world parallel to real life with many of the same attributes, just much more intense and fast-moving. People trying to realize a dream in a world of unpredictability and unknowns, working crazy hours, sacrificing their personal lives, rushing along with all those other technology based start-ups. Medical devices, Internet search engines, telecommunications, nanotechnologies and all the rest competing for the same thing: Money. To make the realization clock tick a little faster.
“Funny you should say that,” Martin finally said. “I’ve always thought of this start-up as a no-brainer.I never tried to justify it in any way.”