It’s nice to see the UK Department of Innovation, Universities & Skills (DIUS) lobbying for a billion pounds to be spent on scientific research, but it’s worrying that, as with most of these ‘stimulus’ packages, little time has been spent figuring out what really needs to be done and the majority of the package is focussed on quick wins and …
VCs Dabble, Dither & Diversify
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about how “with their core business in shambles, some venture capitalists are changing their stripes, styling themselves as investors in distressed assets and public companies.” Here’s why: Start- ups today take a median 6.6 years to go public or get sold, up from 5.4 years in 2005, according to research firm VentureSource. …
Should the VC Model Retire Gracefully?
Umair Haque, whom I’ve referenced before, has a nice post echoing some of the sentiments expressed here and at a growing number of other places – namely that a new economy needs both new financing models and some more creativity. In Yorkshire we’d say it was a clapped out old nag that was only fit for the knackers yard, but …
The Great Leap Forward – Will Europe Be Left Behind?
The slowdown in the pace of China’s development has been one of the consequences of the current economic woes, but may also provide some great opportunities as James Fallows explains in the Atlantic. It’s an excellent article going far beyond the usual post Olympic slowdown stories and looking at how battery companies such as BYD with their electric vehicles are …
Why VCs Hate Science
Georges van Hoegaerden has an interesting comparison between how the venture capital model is supposed to work (the Vinhod Khosla model), and how it actually works (the Subprime VC model) these days – as illustrated by the charts below. It’s a nice comparison and neatly illustrates how the low risk subprime model forces VCs to invest in technologies where much …
Time Catches Up With Technology VCs
It appears that reality is catching up with the Venture Capital industry – albeit slowly. While similar numbers of deals are being done to ten years ago, the IPO window is firmly closed (to use a VC cliché). мебели варнаAverage Time to IPO 1998 3 years 2008 9 years Number of Companies Funded: 1998 1,896 ($14.0B invested) 2008 1,930 ($14.1B …
Building a .-tech economy from the ashes of the current one
Thomas Friedman in this weekends New York Times echoes my recent thoughts on how to get us out of the credit crunch recession: As we invest taxpayer money, let’s do it with an eye to starting a new generation of biotech, info-tech, nanotech and clean-tech companies, with real innovators, real 21st-century jobs and potentially real profits for taxpayers. Our motto …
Hand Over The Cash Or We’ll Smash The Place Up
The UK Venture Capital industry has become the latest to thrust its hand out for a £1 billion bail out claiming that it is “potentially a lost generation of companies.” Why? Well, as we predicted, the reason is that VCs cannot get exits and cannot raise fresh capital for their current portfolio companies, something that may have been buried in …
Out of the Lab
I have long been a fan of the mathematical modelling of materials – it does seem to offer a number of ways to both optimise existing materials and rapidly develop new ones. A growing number of chemists are now suggesting that their time would be better spent working on a computer than fiddling around in the lab, but I’ll keep …
Let A Million Flowers Bloom
Given the global gloom emanating from all sources, it was at least nice to see that our little bit of the world, nanotechnologies, got a mention in Davos and Andrew Maynard who is also on the nanotechnologies council with me has the background details here. However, I’m still a bit worried that most discussions about nanotechnology tend to focus on …