Over the years he watched digital projects lose battles for research dollars. Even though film’s market share was declining, the profit margins were still high and digital seemed an expensive, risky bet.
He recalls efforts in the 1980s to drive innovation by setting up smaller spin-off companies within Kodak, but “it just didn’t work.” Venture companies in Silicon Valley are “pretty wild”, “in Rochester, people come to work at 8 and go home at 5.”
When disruptive technologies appear, there is a lot of uncertainty in the transition from old to new. “The challenge is not so much in developing new technology, but rather shifting the business model in terms of the way firms create and capture value.
These are just a few excerpts from a great piece “What’s Wrong with This Picture: Kodak’s 30-year Slide into Bankruptcy” from Knowledge @ Wharton that (inadvertently) does a terrific job explaining the context and gigantic opportunity that drove Uday and I to create Anthemis and it’s networked ecosystem approach to re-inventing financial services for the digital century. Let’s take each of these in turn:
< < Over the years he watched digital projects lose battles for research dollars. Even though film's market share was declining, the profit margins were still high and digital seemed an expensive, risky bet. >>
I lived this directly and in full Kodachrome color my last few years working for Dresdner Kleinwort, culminating in the creation and subsequent dismantlement following my departure (in 2006) of a new business unit in Capital Markets called Digital Markets. This was the brainchild of then CIO (of the year!) JP Rangaswami and myself, built on the basic premise that exponential technological progress was going to drive an entirely new optimal business model for capital markets activities (as opposed to simply enabling accelerating growth of the existing traditional business models which it had done so well for the previous two decades or so.) That technology, rather than simply being an (important) enabler of the business, was set to become the central driver and that accordingly we had an exceptional opportunity to get out in front of this disruptive change – embracing not resisting – affording us the once-in-a-paradigm-shift chance to fundamentally change (for the better) our competitive position. Further, we felt that Dresdner Kleinwort was ideally positioned in its mediocrity to seize this opportunity: we had much less to lose than the market leaders. (And as history shows, in fact the firm had pretty much nothing to lose…RIP.) But the problem was – and almost always is with large, established, publicly-listed companies – that the vast majority of decision-makers had significant vested interests in maintaining the status quo, and insufficient sensitivity to the downside. Classic agent/principal conflict. Turkeys just don’t vote for Christmas. It’s not rational for them to do so. This is a fact of life, not something really worth bemoaning.
< < He recalls efforts in the 1980s to drive innovation by setting up smaller spin-off companies within Kodak, but "it just didn't work." Venture companies in Silicon Valley are "pretty wild", "in Rochester, people come to work at 8 and go home at 5." >>
My experiences as a senior manager at Dresdner Kleinwort / Allianz led me to increasingly understand that there was a fundamental incompatibility between successfully managing a large incumbent organization and successfully nurturing dynamic, entrepreneurial, disruptive new ventures. I like to think of it as the corporate equivalent of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: just as one cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle, neither can one reap the advantages of a large-scale, established corporation and simultaneously drive and manage emerging, innovative new business models. (Call it Park’s Corporate Paradox?) And in the past 5 or so years since leaving the traditional corporate world, my empirical experience of working closely with start-ups (including starting one!) has only increased my conviction in what I now believe is a fundamental truth. Dresdner Kleinwort (and Paribas before that) – as old hands in the markets world will I hope attest – had positive reputations in the industry for their (relative) ability to innovate, to be at the forefront of new markets and ideas. I believe a key reason they were able to do this was actually because they were well, let’s just say “loosely” managed. They were anything but well-oiled machines. Which, frankly, if you are going to take best advantage of the benefits of being a large, established corporation, is what you need to be. The innovation that emerged in these organizations was a by-product of their relatively weak organizational structures. Put another way, if disruptive innovations are akin to viruses (which I think is not a bad metaphor) then these companies had relatively weaker immune systems (than their market leading counterparts like Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan for example.) However, that is not to say that they had no immune response, and ultimately the incumbent prerogative to maintain the status quo and protect the vital organs won out (in Paribas’ case accelerated by its acquisition by the more tightly managed BNP.)
The important truth to grasp is not that one (the incumbent) is better or worse than the other (the start-up), rather that they are incompatible – structurally, culturally, strategically – in the same host. Yet they are Yin and Yang, and need each other, “complementary opposites that interact within a greater whole, as part of a dynamic system.” The optimal state occurs when they exist in symbiosis – this is in fact the central tenant of Anthemis – our vision, our mission is to act as a substrate that catalyzes, nurtures and enhances this symbiotic relationship. We exist to “improve the health of other companies who grow near us.”
< < When disruptive technologies appear, there is a lot of uncertainty in the transition from old to new. "The challenge is not so much in developing new technology, but rather shifting the business model in terms of the way firms create and capture value. >>
It’s not really about the technology per se, it’s about what technology allows you to do. Often I hear people describe us as “financial technology” investors, but at the risk of being pedantic, this is not really the case. We invest in people and companies that use technology to enable better, often disruptive, new business models. Businesses that seek to address the fundamental needs of their customers in new and better ways that were previously either impossible or sometimes even unthinkable without the enabling power of fast evolving information and communication technologies. It’s not the same thing. And although we invest in these new companies, we are not investors – at least not in the mainstream sense. We aren’t a venture capital or private equity fund. We are ourselves leveraging technology to create a new type of organization, one that we believe is highly additive to the existing ecosystem of large incumbents, start-ups and traditional venture and growth investors. Complementary rather than competitive.
Too often, the conversation around innovation is framed as big v. small, good v. evil and works against the grain of what we believe is the objective reality. We want to re-frame the conversation, work with the grain of the history and the market to help the various different participants in the (financial services) ecosystem leverage their innate advantages (and mitigate their inherent weaknesses.) And if we succeed in this mission, we are certain that we will create enormous value for our own shareholders along the way.
Networks not hierarchies
We believe that the most successful companies of the future – both large and small – will be the ones who embrace a network-driven philosophy and operating ethos. The vertically-integrated Sloan-ian corporation of the 20th century, so ideally adapted to the economy of the Industrial Age, will increasingly struggle to remain relevant in the environment of accelerating cultural and technological change the characterizes the economy of the 21st century Information Age. Large, sector-leading incumbents will need to become more self-aware of both their defensible strengths and core competencies and of their inherent weaknesses and blind spots, which includes the ability to manage disruptive change. They will need to purge all vestiges of not-invented-here mentalities and pro-actively support (both financially and commercially) wider, outside innovation networks while developing optimized methodologies for bringing these outside innovations into their organizations as they mature. And continuously remain aware of the always changing ferment on the edges of their competitive space. Small, cutting-edge start-ups will need to become increasingly good at leveraging existing infrastructures – not just compute and storage infrastructure – but distribution and industry specific infrastructures, or as John Borthwick of Betaworks points out, the best new disruptive innovators “do what (they) do best and outsource the rest.”
This new paradigm creates a significant opportunity for a new type of company to emerge. Companies that are natively optimized to act as a connective layer between the old and the new. Companies that are deliberately tuned to operate within the new network-centric economy. Companies that are explicitly built to nurture ecosystems of talent, technologies and products and services. Anthemis is one of these new companies – a “third place” so to speak – positioned between the established industry leaders and the emerging new innovators, acting as a sort of “translation layer” helping the former to understand and adapt to the changing environment and the latter to identify and focus on the biggest market opportunities while leveraging the core strengths of the existing industry infrastructure. While our focus is on financial services and marketplaces, I am certain this same opportunity exists across any number of industries or markets. Indeed, Betaworks – “A New Medium Company” is a good example of a successful emerging company with a similar positioning and philosophy but focused on the media space. If they don’t exist already, I am sure similar constructs would work well in other industries.
Rusting away
Often when I give presentations on our vision of the future of finance, I am challenged with the question: “But do you really think [insert favorite giant financial services company] will disappear?”, I am at pains to make clear that (a) I don’t know (b) it’s possible, though not necessarily likely, or will take a very (very) long time and (c) that it kind of misses the point in that one would hope that their aspiration is to thrive and not simply survive.
There are a number of different failure modes for established market leaders, most of which are relatively unspectacular and many that don’t actually result in the company disappearing. We remember the Lehmans, the Enrons and the WorldComs but thankfully these are actually the exception. The greatest risk for these companies is not catastrophic overnight disaster but a slow inexorable decline into irrelevancy or even bankruptcy. Big companies typically don’t blow up, they mostly just rust away. The actual speed of this decline often depends on the nature of the sector, it’s “installed” base and particularly it’s regulatory “relevance” in particular. Leaders in highly regulated and deeply embedded (in our economies) industries like finance and telecoms can survive for years and even decades by deploying their considerable resources to protect their position and slow (but not stop) their decline. But how much better off would their shareholders, employees and customers be if they instead marshaled these same resources in a more constructive direction, embracing their real strengths and acknowledging their structural weaknesses in order to evolve and succeed in our changing world, rather that just settling for survival? (Side note: this strikes to the heart of the principal/agent problem that plagues many big, listed companies – for the middle and senior management of these firms, simply ensuring their company survives is often a more than good enough outcome, requiring significantly less energy and psychological commitment while delivering sufficient financial rewards and positional prestige to meet or exceed their personal aspirations. I am not criticizing so much as acknowledging that human nature being what it is, that it is damn hard to resist such a path, even for those with the best intentions.)
Say Cheese
The experts at Wharton note that “adapting to technological change can be especially challenging for established companies like Kodak because entrenched leadership often finds it difficult to break old patterns that once spelled success. Kodak’s history shows that innovation alone isn’t enough; companies must also have a clear business strategy that can adapt to changing times. Without one, disruptive innovations can sink a company’s fortunes — even when the innovations are its own.”
The world is changing. Financial services are no longer immune to these forces of fundamental change. Changing technology, demography and culture are unstoppable forces that if ignored will slowly but surely rust away the competitive advantages of traditional business models. Resist it or embrace it. But you can’t change it. It’s a bit scary sure but also incredibly exciting. Jump in. If you are in financial services, we can probably help.
It’s a better choice than waiting for your Kodak moment.
Financial institutions are already highly regulated and one could argue that at best, this has not achieved the desired outcomes and at worst has actually contributed to some of the most egregious behaviors as the clever folks in financial institutions lost sight of the end game (ie the products and services and customers that lie at the heart of their raison d’etre) and focused increasing amount of energy and talent to working the system.
And not unlike Br’er Rabbit fighting with the Tar Baby, getting stuck and then pleading with Mr. Fox not to be thrown into the Briar Patch, the large incumbent banks pleading with the regulators not to write more rules may just be a brilliant case of misdirection.
but do please, Brer Fox, don’t fling me in dat brier-patch
Of course more regulations hurt the large financial institutions, but they hurt new entrants more. And competition is a whole lot scarier than regulation to incumbents. If you want to get a sense of this, you could do worse than reading Aaron Greenspan’s take on US payment regulations. And similar examples exist across the spectrum of financial services and across the globe.
The irony is that most financial regulations are born through the desire to protect the little guy from losses, and to some extent they achieve this on one (direct) level but following the law of unintended consequences, the result to often is to create an environment where far larger risks (and losses) are incurred at a systemic level. And who pays for that? Well as we all know now, increasingly it’s all of us (including of course, the little guy.) Via government subsidies, interventions, increasing costs to maintain ever larger and more complex regulatory regimes, all of which need to be paid for with higher taxes and more importantly slower economic growth. Here the bankers are right, all these new regulations make our current system less able to produce growth which of course hits the 99% hardest. But then the bankers stop before asking for a level regulatory playing field that would pour fuel on the smouldering fire of new, innovative, disruptive entrants. Please Lord deregulate me, but not just yet.
Security theater is a term that describes security countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security…Security theater gains importance both by satisfying and exploiting the gap between perceived risk and actual risk.
Regulators (and politicians) sensing the need to be seen to be doing something about the risk, fall into a trap of creating more and more regulations hoping to protect all of us from ourselves, only to create new (almost always) more dangerous and costly risks higher up in the system. Rinse and repeat. Until these risks reach the top of the pyramid and can no longer be shuffled and redistributed. At which time, they come tumbling down on all. This regulatory theater can be comforting in the short term but actually takes us further and further away from a sustainable solution to managing financial risks in our economies.
These risks exist and cannot be regulated away. Call it the 1st law of Financial Dynamics: the of conservation of risk. And I would postulate that pushed down to the base of our economic system, these risks would be easier and less costly to manage. With a more competitive and open system, with continuous renewal through many new entrants, the end users of financial services would get better (higher quality, lower cost) products and services with much lower risk of catastrophic systemic failures. Certainly – statistically – some of these new entrants would be managed incompently. Some would be frauds. People, customers would lose money. But the costs of dealing with these failures would pale in comparison to the multi-trillion dollar, economy-crushing losses that the existing system has allowed, nay encouraged to build up.
I’ll finish with an example, take UK retail banking. Concentrated, uncompetitive, legacy. No new entrants, no competition. Metro Bank, NBNK, Virgin/Northern Rock in my opinion are just shuffling deck chairs; better than nothing I would grant but essentially no real innovation, run in the same way with (mostly) the same assets, same people and same business models that previously existed. A token nod for the industry and the government to be able to say their is new competition (much as a dictator allows a hapless opponent to run in an election…) – window dressing. And even here, look at the hoops Metro Bank (who claim to be the “first new UK bank in 100 years”, QED…) had to go through to get a new banking license… If I were Cameron/Osbourne/Cable, the first thing I would do to start fixing the problem would be to create a new “entry” banking charter. Light touch. Basically just vet the founders and investors for fitness. Perhaps make them put up a certain minimum amount of the equity and/or guarantees as a percentage of their net worth. 90 days from application to charter. Nothing more. But restrict these new banks to say £50mn of assets until they have a 2 year track record (at which point they could apply for an increase in permissible assets and/or a full license.) Then oblige the large banks to open up their core banking infrastructure via APIs – analogous to obliging BT to make available their core telecom network to other operators.
I wouldn’t be surprised if within a year or two you had 30 or 40 new banks competing in various different ways, with many different (and differentiated) value propositions. And some would go bust. And some would be frauds. But even making the (ridiculous in my opinion) assumption that they all lost all of their customer’s money, and all of this money was insured by the government, we are talking about £2bn. Compare that to the direct losses of c. £23bn on RBS and Lloyd’s alone, not even considering the contingent losses and indirect costs born by the UK economy as a result of their predicament. Of course, I believe that many of these new banks would succeed and grow and any losses would be substantially smaller than £2bn. But none of these new banks would be too big to fail for a very long time (hopefully never) and although failure of even just one of them would attract headlines and aggrieved customers giving interviews on BBC1, especially if the cause of failure were to be fraud – it would behove us to put this into perspective. To not forget the difference between perceived and actual risk. To remember that huge failure even if diffuse and “no one individual could credibly be blamed” even if more psychologically comfortable, is actually much much more damaging than smaller point failures where cause and effect are more brutally obvious.
The world’s incumbent financial institutions are deeply mired in Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, protected by regulatory barriers to entry that while not fundamentally altering the long-term calculus, have pushed back the day of reckoning only to make that day seem ever scarier. It might seem counter-intuitive, but I think we should be calling not for more regulation but for de-regulation of financial services (the real, robust, playing-field-leveling type and not the let-us-do-what-we-want-but-keep-out-any-competitors type). Competition is a far more robust route to salvation than regulation. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
To meaningfully differentiate yourself from everyone else in the same space, you have to define the situation in the industry, segment, or category that you want to challenge. Here’s what a list of what you want to challenge might look like:
This is an area in which everyone seems to be stuck in the same predicament and nothing has changed in a very long time.
This is an area where profit performance is average—it really should be more successful than it is.
This is a category where growth is slow and everything seems the same.
Once you have a situation to focus on, describe it in one sentence: “How can we disrupt the competitive landscape in [insert your situation] by delivering an unexpected solution?”
I guess if you had to boil our mission statement at Anthemis Group down to one question,
How can we disrupt the competitive landscape in financial services by delivering an unexpected solution?”
would probably do the trick quite nicely.
Of course, our approach to answering this question is perhaps not to answer it directly but rather to seek out and support a constellation of passionate, brilliant, “what if?” thinking entrepreneurs who are asking this question with respect to specific sectors, products and geographies in financial services (banking, payments, risk management, identity, investing, etc.) and contribute our intellectual and financial capital towards amplifying their vision and improving their chances of success. For all you capital markets geeks out there, we think this approach generates (as close as you can get to) pure “alpha” in that our returns are pretty much divorced from general market movements as the impact on valuation of success (or failure) in building these new businesses far exceeds the second or third order impacts on valuation of prevailing overall public (or even) private market conditions. Clearly, our success is not guaranteed – not by any stretch of the imagination – but at least the input parameters, the choices we make, are the key drivers and within our control. (And not subject to the vagaries of a co-hosted blade pumped up with algos in New Jersey…cf my last post.)
This in our opinion is a much better set of reference terms. Even more so because it doesn’t rely on our unique genius, but rather structurally taps in to a deep and expanding pool of talented people, pursuing their own visions and goals, loosely-coupled through the ecosystem and networks we strive to nurture and grow. We don’t have to make all the decisions. We don’t have to have all the brilliant ideas. We don’t have to do all the heavy lifting. Which is certainly a relief to us and I suspect to our investors as well. If you want to take the ecosystem metaphor a bit further, I guess it would be fair to say that our position is akin to dirt in forest. Or swamp water in a wetland. ie Trying to provide a fertile and supporting substrate upon which the wonders of evolution and life can flourish and grow. Perhaps not a very sexy image, but ask any farmer and she’ll tell you there is nothing as wonderful as a field of deep, dark, steaming dirt.
And coming back to Luke’s three foundational criteria, I think it is clear to all that you can take pretty much any sector of financial services and it would emphatically tick each box. It’s an incredibly fertile environment for disruption. So you know, we’ve got that going for us. We just need to make sure we plant the right seeds.
I woke up reasonably early this morning with a long list of things to do today. But given that it’s Saturday, I thought it’d be ok to start slowly with a cup of green tea and a few minutes with one of the many as yet unread books beckoning from the coffee table. So I picked up Hugh MacLeod’s“Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination”. I first met Hugh about 6 or so years ago via my friend JP, and was immediately charmed by his great cartoons and unique and brutally insightful characterisation of the “corporate world.” Sort of a grown-up’s Scott Adams…
About 5 years ago I read Po Bronson‘s “What Should I Do with My Life?” and it made an impact. Not too long after I ended up leaving a long and pretty successful career in investment banking to take a new path – one that has led to the creation of Anthemis Group and to moving our family to Geneva. If you aren’t sure you are living your life the way you’d like to, as a first step I’d say read this book. If nothing else Po is an entertaining and engaging writer and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the stories he tells.
As long as you feel inspired, your life is being well spent.
Hugh’s book took only an hour to read, but it brought back into laser focus the real reasons for which I chose the path I am now on. As he states – and all entrepreneurs know – there are a lot of times when it just seems overwhelming. But he also reminds us that that is where passion and purpose come to our rescue. Without these, we are doomed to fail. With them, we succeed even in failure. Buy it. Read it. And keep it close to your desk to lean on in those moments of doubt.
I often, ok sometimes, get asked what I look for in an entrepreneur / company founder / ceo and despite having a very clear vision of the ideal profile in my mind, I used to struggle to articulate it clearly and concisely. Then last fall I read The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life and found that the legendary Mr. Buffett (albeit in a very different context – can you guess??) – had done the work for me. With some paraphrasing and adaptation, here is what he said and what I’ve adopted as my “elevator” founders test:
When I invest in an entrepreneur, I’m going into a foxhole with this guy and he has to be the right choice. The question is, who has all the qualities that will provide leadership to the company, cause me not to worry for a second about whether anything was going on that would subsequently embarrass the company, or cause it to fail through lack of ambition or effort. When I talk to entrepreneurs what goes through my mind is essentially the same questions that would go through your mind if you were deciding who you wanted to be a trustee under your will, or who you wanted to have marry your daughter. I look for the kind of person who is going to be able to make decisions as to what should get to me and what could get solved below the line. A person who will tell me all the bad news, because good news always takes care of itself in business.
And when I look across the founders of our portfolio companies, I would definitely be comfortable with any of them being trustees of my will. As for my daughter, well they’re all too old for her anyway and besides they wouldn’t stand a chance…
I haven’t had much time to write in the last few months, part of the unavoidable occupational hazards of building a business and a company, but I felt almost obliged to comment on the latest round of major financial exchange consolidation as the author of the 2005 “Amazonbay” video…
So what was my initial reaction? Completely underwhelmed. The question that immediately popped into my head was: “Is that it???” Is that the most exciting, most optimal path to future growth that these management teams and their armies of advisors could come up with? And if so, what next? Even theoretically, only one more iteration of the global consolidation game exists and I’m not sure anyone would really advocate for a monolithic NYSEEuronextDBCMESGXetc… So the question that still will haunt the new, bigger boardrooms is not answered but only postponed: whither future growth in an increasingly commoditized business??
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a hard question. I don’t have an answer either. But you won’t be surprised if I suggest that it is probably to be found in thinking about post-consolidation de-consolidation aimed at creating new companies focused on various horizontal layers in the stack. Indeed, if the only path possible to get to a very small handful of global core exchange platforms was this flurry of mergers, then perhaps it was not all in vain. I would accept that in this layer of the “exchange stack” there is truly economies of scale, much as for instance with core communication infrastructure.
But then I would suggest that management of these platforms then needs to focus intensely on dis-investing themselves of other layers of the stack where economies of scale are less in evidence or absent completely. I don’t want to be cynical but giving the combination of normal 20th century management dynamics (bigger is better) and the particular emotio-political aspects of the exchange business, I would be very surprised to see anything like this happen. If I were a shareholder of any of these companies my fear would be that any of the advantages that arise from these combinations are ultimately subsumed by the disadvantages engendered by complexity (in every dimension.)
Giant financial exchanges – like the giant banks – aren’t going to disappear overnight. Possibly never. But to frame the debate in this “new” vs “old” / “mammal” vs “dinosaur” context is to miss the point. There are dozens of good (and some less good) reasons why these incumbents will be very hard to dislodge, and to focus on this – while potentially entertaining – skirts around the really interesting question which is to ask: where (and by whom) will value be created in digital transaction execution and management over the the next decade or two?
I don’t envy the management teams that lead these exchanges – they are forced to operate in a highly constrained political and cultural space and having fairly recently lived through the golden age for their traditional business model would seem – at least in the short term – to have huge asymmetrical downside in terms of the world’s expectations for them. Not fun.
There are some very interesting opportunities for these giant trading platforms in the years ahead. I just think that things will have to get a lot worse first before the management of these firms are in a position to act on these opportunities and think laterally. Or should I say horizontally!
This weekend when catching up on my inbox, I stumbled upon a short article by Steve Denning opining on how Amazon was a different kind of company. His summary of how they were different really resonated with me and so I thought it would be republishing it here, not the least because it is a great characterisation of our portfolio companies at Anthemis and although we haven’t to date articulated it in exactly this format, it is an excellent proxy for some of the filters we run companies through before making an investment decision.
In effect, there are two kinds of organizations in the marketplace today:
Organizations that keep finding new ways to to delight you – and those that are trying to make money off you.
Those that help you solve problems – and those that are pushing their stuff at you.
Those that are steadily innovating – and those that are doggedly tweaking their value chain.
Those are responsive and agile – and those that are busy doing their own thing.
Those that are easy to do business with – and those that make you feel queasy.
Those that surprise you with unexpected extra value – and those who surprise you with unexpected extra charges.
We have a strong conviction that companies that behave in this way, that have this cultural DNA, will generate much higher risk-adjusted returns over the medium to long term than the other kind. Further, we believe that the performance gap between these two types of company will only get wider in the Information Age.
84 percent of executives say innovation is extremely or very important to their companies’ growth strategy. The results also show that the approach companies use to generate good ideas and turn them into products and services has changed little since before the crisis, and not because executives thought what they were doing worked perfectly. Further, many of the challenges—finding the right talent, encouraging collaboration and risk taking, organizing the innovation process from beginning to end—are remarkably consistent. Indeed, surveys over the past few years suggest that the core barriers to successful innovation haven’t changed, and companies have made little progress in surmounting them.
As I’ve written many times before, I think they are barking up the wrong tree. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too which in the context of a traditionally organized (read 20th century business school optimal model) large company is like trying to pee in the corner of a round room. ie Pursuing ‘non-linear’ innovation is not only difficult for these kinds of organisations, it actually requires a framework that is often diametrically opposed to the framework that governs the rest of their business, the business that actually pays the (current) bills. And so it is entirely unsurprising that companies find it hard / impossible to assimilate this within their structures, culture and reward systems. Perhaps paradoxically, one could argue that the better managed a large company is for its current/core business, the worse this disconnect; in poorly managed large companies there is probably more room to roam “off the reservation” so to speak… But I don’t think anyone – including me – would suggest that it would create overall value to manage poorly just in order to pick up a bit of innovation juice around the edges.
So what’s a big company to do? Well I think they should look to invest some of their capital outside their walls. Not corporate venture per se – the corporate antibodies end up killing / ensuring failure of dedicated corporate venture initiatives 9 times out of 10. (A notable exception to this rule – the one of ten (hundred?) – is Intel Capital. If you think your company can do this then go for it. I personally suspect that one of the reasons Intel Capital managed to avoid institutional purgatory is that Intel has a very strong entrepreneurial culture and leadership (deep into the firm not just at the top) that had first hand memories of building businesses from the ground up. Google Ventures may enjoy similar success for the same reasons…) For the rest, I would suggest setting aside a certain amount of capital to make passive minority investments either directly or via specialist sector-specific early stage investors (like us if you are a financial institution, yes I’m talking my book) in companies innovating – especially in those using ‘non-linear’/disruptive approaches – in their markets.
Passive – meaning no board seats, no control – because the alternative would result in adverse selection bias or mission dilution/suffocation or both. Adverse selection, because the best, brightest and most ambitious start-ups in your sector will not take your money if you ask for control and mission dilution / suffocation because if they do take your money and give you some control, your corporate antibodies will do everything they can to assimilate and/or crush what they will correctly see as a threat to the companies core business.
So why bother at all? Why not just wait to see who emerges as winners and then buy them once the risk is gone? Principally for two reasons (in order of importance):
Because you have to have a “position” to really harvest the informational value: this is the trader in me speaking – anyone who has ever traded any asset knows instinctively that the difference between an ‘opinion’ and actually having a ‘position’ is huge. Indeed any good trader who needs to follow any particular market closely – even if this market isn’t their first order concern and/or they don’t (yet) have any strong conviction – will take a small/nominal position in said market in order to ‘be in the flow’ and truly feel the rhythm of that market. Put another way, picture the impact of an internal board presentation on top 10 new industry trends and 20 new companies ‘to watch’ vs a presentation of ‘this is how the 20 companies we have invested in are doing’ and tell me honestly that both will have the same impact…
Because you just might not get the chance to buy the winners – either at all (think Google, Facebook, etc.) or it will cost you very very dearly and worse you probably won’t have enough information to truely know / understand what you are buying (the most toxic manifestation of this is what I call the ‘panic buy’ – eg NewsCorp/MySpace.) In other words, the buy later strategy has it’s own set of very real risks. And even when/if you do ‘buy later’ a company that you haven’t invested in, as a result of (1) above you will almost certainly be able to better mitigate some of these ‘buy later’ risks.
So why don’t more big companies do this? I’m not sure. Would be interesting if McKinsey would ask this question (they are more likely to get answers than The Park Paradigm, not sure I have a lot of Fortune500 C-suite readers!) I suspect it is because the time horizons needed to be successful in such a strategy (5-10 years) far exceed the time horizons of most senior executives. And related to this, that they are afraid – quite possibly correctly – that “Wall Street”/”the City” will chastise them for spending any money on ‘speculative’ investments, that it is “not their job” and that they should “focus on their core”. Funny however how the most successful executives and companies however manage to ignore the peanut gallery and pursue their plans with conviction and diligence. Perhaps these are the companies who may listen and find value in my suggested approach…
Ten days ago, an irresponsible and unthinking young man crashed into me from behind at great speed while I was skiing with my children. The force of the impact broke two things: my right ski and the top of my right arm. There were multiple fractures and (the shoulder being full of many nerves, tendons, muscles) I was advised that I would need surgery to ensure proper healing and that I should entrust this only to an expert specialist surgeon. Fortunately, via my network I was able to identify just such a doctor quickly but it meant that my surgery could not be scheduled until Wednesday last week. I think it is fair to say that I totally underestimated the seriousness of the injury and surgery and somehow thought I’d be patched up and good to go in a day or so. Today is Tuesday and only now am I “back at my desk” feeling pretty good, although without the use of my right hand for typing. So, other than some limited iphone-based twitter and email scanning, a couple calls and starting some “to-do triage” over the last couple days, this totally random accident has cost me nine days “offline” (in the broader getting-things-done sense) and will continue to impact my productivity – in particular my ability to travel and type – for at least the next 4-6 weeks. While I am confident that I’ll be able to adapt somewhat (my left-hand only typing is already 5-10x faster than a couple days ago, although still not close to my usual 60+ wpm and I can now actually get the curser to the right spot in under a minute using a mouse), it would be ridiculous not to acknowledge this as a unwelcome setback.
But why am I explaining this here? And no, it is not to generate an outpouring of sympathy (which however I must acknowledge as very nice as I have been fortunate enough to have been reminded of over the past week.) No, there are effectively two distinct reasons I thought it would be worth telling this story.
The first is from a strictly practical standpoint: to get the word out to all the people I “work with” on a day-to-day basis without needing to write dozens or hundreds of emails (never much fun at the best of times but even less appealing with one-hand…) I suspect not all the people that I’d like to have this information are readers, and clearly for many of you this is probably unnecessary information, but while clearly not perfect, the broadcast mechanism of a blog I felt was the best option available to me. So for those of you waiting for an email or call to be returned, or an appointment to be confirmed, now you know what has happened and I would ask your indulgence and patience. If you have heard nothing back from me in the next few days or so, or if it is more urgent than that, please follow-up with a nudge. Otherwise, give me a couple weeks and I’m sure I can get back on top of things (at least as much as I ever do!)
The second reason is hopefully more interesting to a wider audience and is about addressing one of the risks that seems to me to be less discussed in the vibrant “start-up commons” that many other issues venture entrepreneurs and investors face. This is the risk to founders health from exogenous, unanticipated events.
In particular, I’m interested in risks not readily addressable by traditional key-man life insurance. This of course is a standard requirement when raising outside investment and insofar as it protects investor capital (if not their opportunity cost) from the worst-case result of a catastrophic injury or death of one or more of the founders (ie winding up of company), it probably doesn’t help in the more probable situation of a significant productivity loss due to severe illness or accidental injury. Thinking through our portfolio of early stage companies, I dare say none of them has thought much about this except for one, and if I am honest, this was only because we had to manage just such a risk in the early days of the company (which I’m happy to report was successfully done, helped of course by the individual’s recovery proceeding as expected.) If you are a start-up founder or investor, have you given this much thought? If so what sort of solutions or contingencies have you put in place to mitigate this risk? Are any insurance companies writing policies that pay out (to companies, quickly) in the case of non-critical short term health issues with key personnel? If so is the pricing reasonable?
I’ve obviously had a few days and a good reason to think about this, and just to be clear, have been considering the question in the first instance from the point of view of a founder. (For while we are also investors, my company is in fact a start-up and I am reliant upon it for my livelihood.) And in terms of protecting my family, I have life insurance, but this accident underlined that in the event I were temporarily incapacitated and unable to work, mitigating the financial risk arising is potentially much more problematic, and that this is a problem (most acutely) faced by start-ups and small businesses. Indeed, were I still working for an established (big) company or organization, I have a very nice letter from my doctor stating I cannot work for the next 4 weeks and so I would sit at home collecting my salary and healing. But even more importantly, the business of the company would go on (even if I were Steve Jobs); and while (one would hope that!) some opportunity cost would be incurred, the larger and more established the company or organization, the more marginal it would be. ie The problem (for founders and their investors) isn’t insuring the loss of a month’s salary/revenues/burn per se (which is I’m sure a tractable actuarial problem.) Rather, it is insuring the opportunity loss of a month of foregone productivity or progress. And because the “value” of this lost opportunity is subject to so many internal, external and temporal/situational variables unique to each founder/company pair, I suspect this is probably an uninsurable risk, at least in the sense of financial insurance. Indeed, I think the solution to mitigating this risk if one exists lies more in ‘operational engineering” admitting that in some cases even this will be impossible.
And so my (highly tentative) conclusions are that:
founders should probably think about a “Plan B” to manage their personal risk (eg this could be cash savings, support from family, returning to traditional employment, etc.)
investors need to consider the value of portfolio diversification in this context and perhaps, insofar as possible, think about what critical skills may be replaceable on a temporary basis should a founder be incapacitated for a few weeks or months and ideally build a network of people who have or have access to these skill sets; my thinking here is not to suggest that founders are replaceable but that it may in some cases be possible to soften the impact should the unexpected happen.
I would be very interested in the community’s thoughts on this and in particular whether they think it is a risk that can and should be acknowledged and managed in early-stage (and/or later-stage) companies, or if on the contrary they believe this is an intractable risk and so just needs to be “accepted” without wasting any time, energy or money trying to manage it.
So having spent 90 minutes on this post (sooo slow…) I better get down to work, and so while I’ve a dozen posts up my sling, I probably won’t be back here for a week or so as I work my way through a daunting (but mostly exciting) to do list. Oh, and for the next few weeks at least, you can just call me Lefty.
You start. You struggle against initial inertia to gain velocity. You succeed. You grow. Your success breeds more success. Momentum is now your friend. But the world changes: technology, markets, society… And your hard won momentum keeps hurtling your (now large and profitable) company down the same trajectory. And momentum is now your enemy. Ah, the joys of…inertia.
The recent sensation caused by an ex-Microsoft insider’s NYT op-ed is just one more example of this seemingly inevitible ‘circle of (corporate) life.’:
Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.’s, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever. Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest.
What happened? Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.
Innovation is a new way of doing something or “new stuff that is made useful”
I’ve of course added my two cents to this discussion, with my thoughts on the subject drawing on my personal experiences (and those of friends and colleagues) of having tried (very hard) to sponsor a pro-active approach to disruptive innovation in a very large company. For those of you not familiar with my hypothesis on the question, I’ll save you the trouble of digging through my blog, it boils down to the complex weave of organizational and personal dynamics that unavoidably emerge when you assemble large groups of people in one organization:
Loss aversion dominates: most people (and sub-groups) fear loss much more than they enjoy gain. This is why the status quo is so closely guarded (at any level of resolution, from the individual through to the overall company.)
Dancing with the one that brought you: at any level of seniority, it is likely that the person in charge got to be that person in charge by being particularly skillful or adept at navigating the existing business and/or organizational model. It’s like the America’s Cup: the winner sets the rules (and has no incentive to adopt “new rules” for which they are probably less well adapted.
In fact, Machievelli eloquently summed it up 500 years ago:
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders of those who would gain by the new ones.
These principles form the core of the corporate immune system which considers any disruptive innovation as a threatening virus. So what is a big company to do? Should they accept the inevitability of decline (hopefully slow, profitable and graceful) or can they postpone or avoid this fate?
In some (most?) cases, I would suggest that they accept decline but this does not mean giving up. On the contrary it means aggresively (and even creatively managing the exisiting assets to create as much value as possible as the business model and or product ‘runs off’. This indeed was my prescription for Microsoft when I wrote two years ago that they should break-up the company and re-jig the capital structure, running the Windows/Office businesses for cash (with a debt financed balance sheet) and let a thousand new baby Microsofts bloom. A conventional view would see this as a failure of management and/or ambition. Obviously I think this attitude is ass backward: running the core products for cash while releasing enormous amounts of human and financial capital, which in turn could be used to create hundreds of new companies could – using any metric you like – only be considered a triumphant success. But convention, inertia and ego means that this path to success is rarely if ever taken by the leaders of market giants. Just in the last couple weeks the idea that Google might becoming the ‘next Microsoft’ has gained currency (at least in the valley.) I asked this same question (in May 2008:)
I know it has been asked a million times before but is Google the next Microsoft? (At least from a financial point of view…) At the start of 1996, MSFT traded at c. $6/share. Four years later they peaked at almost $60/share. GOOG IPO’ed at c. $85/share in 2004, and just over three years later peaked at over $700/share. Both moves of approximately 10x. Since 2000, MSFT has been more or less range bound at around $30/share, despite continuing to grow it’s top and bottom lines and produce prodigious amounts of cash. I’m not suggesting history will repeat itself exactly – perhaps we have not yet seen the peak in GOOG’s share price (sell at $850?), and I’m certain they will continue to grow their top and bottom lines and produce prodigious amounts of cast in the next 5-10 years. But…will the stock eventually settle at around $500 – 600/share…? Is it conceivable that Google, like Microsoft before it, will become the place where good companies are bought only to disappear?
However, like with human life, I think there are probably a number of recipes to extend the natural corporate life (and the quality of those extra years) and to leave a more valuable legacy when and if the company ultimately disappears. Starting with investing some of their excess capital in the innovation ecosystem that surrounds them. As I have found however, this idea is anathema to most large companies. And with some reason. The history of ‘corporate venturing’ is indeed (as Azeem Ahzar eloquently writes) riddled with failure. My view is that this is because it is exceeding hard to do this in house: the corporate antibodies as described above will almost always do their job and sabotage any in-house venture program. And yet just investing as an LP in an outside venture fund – even if one that happens to focus on markets relevant to the company – is an understandably unsatisfactory and probably equally ineffective alternative.
But we think there is a third way: a focused, strategic innovation program run independently from, but in close collaboration with the company. Maybe we can help your company. You know where to find us: where innovation grows.
, lays out 
. I first met Hugh about 6 or so years ago via my friend 
and it made an impact. Not too long after I ended up leaving a long and pretty successful career in investment banking to take a new path – one that has led to the creation of Anthemis Group and to moving our family to Geneva. If you aren’t sure you are living your life the way you’d like to, as a first step I’d say read this book. If nothing else Po is an entertaining and engaging writer and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the stories he tells.
and found that the legendary Mr. Buffett (albeit in a very different context – can you guess??) – had done the work for me. With some paraphrasing and adaptation, here is what he said and what I’ve adopted as my “elevator” founders test:
Ten days ago, an irresponsible and unthinking young man crashed into me from behind at great speed while I was skiing with my children. The force of the impact broke two things: my right ski and the top of my right arm. There were multiple fractures and (the shoulder being full of many nerves, tendons, muscles) I was advised that I would need surgery to ensure proper healing and that I should entrust this only to an expert specialist surgeon. Fortunately, via my network I was able to identify just such a doctor quickly but it meant that my surgery could not be scheduled until Wednesday last week. I think it is fair to say that I totally underestimated the seriousness of the injury and surgery and somehow thought I’d be patched up and good to go in a day or so. Today is Tuesday and only now am I “back at my desk” feeling pretty good, although without the use of my right hand for typing. So, other than some limited iphone-based twitter and email scanning, a couple calls and starting some “to-do triage” over the last couple days, this totally random accident has cost me nine days “offline” (in the broader getting-things-done sense) and will continue to impact my productivity – in particular my ability to travel and type – for at least the next 4-6 weeks. While I am confident that I’ll be able to adapt somewhat (my left-hand only typing is already 5-10x faster than a couple days ago, although still not close to my usual 60+ wpm and I can now actually get the curser to the right spot in under a minute using a mouse), it would be ridiculous not to acknowledge this as a unwelcome setback.
(which however I must acknowledge as very nice as I have been fortunate enough to have been reminded of over the past week.) No, there are effectively two distinct reasons I thought it would be worth telling this story. ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=9b14e83a-b3f0-451f-90b7-aefce4fc293a)
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