Start-Up: the book

It is an exercise I usually like to use as an introduction to high-tech entrepreneurship: give me the name of 10 big sucess stories, and I mean (for example) the name of 10 public companies, which were founded as start-ups in the last 40 years. Usually, it is quite easy to give American names, and more difficult to find European ones. So the tables below give such names for IT first and for biotech second.

I had done the exercise in my book in 2007 but some companies such as Business Objects or Sun Microsystems have been acquired. Here I add the sales and profit numbers to the market caps and the number of employees.

What is striking I think, in addition to the difference in order of magnitudes is the difference between foundation to IPO year. Biotech is slightly different, though I am not sure it is fundamentally different… It is however interesting to notice that time to IPO is much more similar between the two continents in biotech than it is in IT.

Another interesting illustration about the differences between America and Europe: growth in the US and UK biotech. The full account can be found in Nature Biotechnology and my friend Andre mentioned the blog Corante where he read about it.

The conclusion of this blogger is:

“What I found interesting about the editorial, though, wasn’t these conclusions per se – after all, as the piece goes on to say, they aren’t really a surprise [...] No, the surprise was the recommendation at the end: while the government agency that ran this study is suggesting tax changes, entrepreneur training, various investment initiatives, and so on, the Nature Biotechnology writers ask whether it might not be simpler just to send promising UK ideas to America.

Do the science in Great Britain, they say, and spin off your discovery in the US, where they know how to fund these things. You’ll benefit patients faster, for sure. They’re probably right about that, although it’s not something that the UK government is going to endorse. (After all, that means that the resulting jobs will be created in the US, too). But that illustrates something I’ve said here before, about how far ahead the VC and start-up infrastructure is here in America. There’s no other place in the world that does a better job of funding wild ideas and giving them a chance to succeed in the market.”