Category Archives: Silicon Valley and Europe

The University-based Startup Porsche Principle. Or is it the Tesla Principle?

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Or should it be called the Tesla Index?

In the book The Rainforest that I am currently reading, the authors write about Role Models that “a common phenomenon of university-based startup companies in the United States is what is sometimes jokingly called the Porsche principle. This principle holds that one of the greatest motivators for professors or graduate students on campus to start new companies is when one of their colleagues drives up in a new Porsche after selling their startup. Confidence is contagious”. [Page 210]

It reminds me a famous quote by Tom Perkins: “The difference is in psychology: everybody in Silicon Valley knows somebody that is doing very well in high-tech small companies, start-ups; so they say to themselves “I am smarter than Joe. If he could make millions, I can make a billion”. So they do and they think they will succeed and by thinking they can succeed, they have a good shot at succeeding. That psychology does not exist so much elsewhere.”

I’ve seen it in Europe too, but to be honest, today, at EPFL and probably elsewhere, I would call it the Tesla principle… or Tesla Index. I biked quickly on campus today and here is what I found, although I know of at least 4-5 Teslas close-by… Could this become the equivalent for Innovation to the Impact Factor in Research?!!!Don’t take all this too seriously. Launching a start-up is not motivated by money. It is mostly about passion…

And two more on June 13, 2017…

and June 15, 2017

EPFL’s Tesla Index on June 15, 2017 is larger than 3…

The State of the European Tech

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The recently published The State of the European Tech, co-sponsored by Atomico and Slush is an extremley interesting analysis of the European tech start-up and VC scene. it is a rather long 118-slide document but most (not all) pages provide food for thought.

Here are a couple of comments, in the page order:

– The introduction is too optimistic (slides 5-7). I doubt their title: the future is being invented in Europe. But it has always been Atomico’s founder vision: see Europe and Start-ups : should we worry? Or is there hope? The future will tell us… One interesting point though: London, Berlin and Paris are the 3 hubs main European hubs and Paris was probably underestimated (in the past).

– The entrepreneurial mindset is continuously improving (slides 15-16). Repeat entrepreneurs are more numerous (slide 18). And they mention their importance not so much as future successful entrepreneurs (you may know my doubts – check Serial entrepreneurs: are they better?) but because of the experience and network they bring.

– I love slide 21 with EPFL #4 world wide in Computer Science (though I hate these rankings!). Switzerland is clearly on the map together with the UK. I am honestly less convinced about the impact of business schools in tech (slide 22). Talent exists in Europe but may not be available for tech (slide 23).

– Again the three top hubs are obvious: together London, Paris and Berlin outnumber Silicon Valley. But the ranking from #4 to #20 is mostly linked to city size, not so much any unique positioning. Tech is creating jobs faster than other industries (slide 26). Never too late! But again Europe is fragmented with 153 identified tech hubs (slide 34)

– Migrants (slides 27-29). Again the UK is #1. France and Germany follow. And Switzerland is well-ranked (except for non-Europeans).

– Local entrepreneurs want to stay home (slide 37): 60% prefer home to another place in Euope (17%) or Silicon Valley (12%), even if 25% of founders incorporated outside of their home country (slide 38). Clearly Europe exists! Even if slide 39 shows more local migrations inside Europe, with the exception of London and Berlin again and the links between hubs are weak (slide 41)

– The slides about venture capital are the most surprising. Slide 46 shows that the European investments have jumped from less than $5B before 2013 to $13B in 2015-16. (In comparison the US is about $30B). And the growth is consistent from early eseed ($0-2M) to early stage ($2-5M) and later stage ($10-50+M). I assemble here their data about the UK, Germany, France and Switzerland (slides 50-52). A new generation of investors is confirmed, those who were entrepreneurs 1st (slide 60). The early such actors were Atomico, Liautaud/Balderton, Niel/Kima. But many emerge. A new generation of funds also emerge (slide 64), and yes, US funds invest in Europe (slide 65)

atomico_european_vc

– Their section about deep tech is less convincing (to me). Probably I did not fully understand what they meant by that and why it would be so special. Slides 78-9 about US tech giants coming to Europe and about their acquisitions in Europe is worth checking though.

– I was not convinced either about the growing awareness of European corporations of the importance of tech. Their investments and acquisitions are still small compared to their US counterparts (slides 84-86). But slide 83 is the confirmation of a scary situation. This is another illustration of the Darwinian and Lamarckian innovation. Look at next figure.

atomico_european_giants

– The section about scale-ups and exits (slides 89-101) could have been called unicorns & IPOs. I see bubbles and low value creations. Not good enough and not enough tech…

– Finally the lside about perceived risks is worth spending some time. they classify them as Business issues (40%); Economic issues (30%); European issues (22%); International issues (8%). But somehow their classification is subjective. For example if you combine risk aversion (4%), fear (2%), ambition (2%), that is 8%. And talent (4%), innovation (3%) and education (2%) would be another 9%. These elements which I consider as cultural could be considered as quite high…

All these notes were taken while reading so don’t see them as a deep analysis and you should build your own views about this really interesting analysis.

The top US and European (former) start-ups

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Since I published my book in 2007, I have regularly been doing the exercise of comparing the largest US (former) start-ups and their European counterparts. In 2010, I had the following tables:

top-10-usa-2010

top-10-europe-2010

What I call former start-ups are public high-tech companies which did not exist 50 years ago. Of course Europe is struggling; this has been (and still is) my concern and the reason of my book. Now here is my latest exercise.

top-10-usa-2016

top-10-europe-2016

I will let you make your own opinion about how things have evolved. I see quite striking elements. The main one comes from a presentation I saw a few days ago about the evolution of the American biggest market capitalizations. Here it is… quite impressive…

largest-companies-by-market-cap-chart
Source: Visual Capitalist

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.