This great search was powered by Search Unleashed.
Help to remove this message by getting the site owner to support this software.
You may have noticed, I haven’t been posting much here lately. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, probably just the opposite (!) but have be full out from dawn until dusk working on a number of exciting new projects including our own development (more on that in a few weeks.) One project that has been front of mind the past few weeks is a new company we are developing that is …
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.
The race the create the Mint.com for the UK has claimed its first victim. Kublax, a Seedcamp 2007 winner which launched in August 2008, has now gone into administration, saying it was unable to secure a further funding round.
I’m pretty disappointed to tell the truth. Not so much because we held a small stake (via our investment in seedcamp) although this is unfortunate, but mainly because I think their business proposition is valid and although they certainly made mistakes along the way, these mistakes were probably avoidable and actually more to do with raising capital and managing a start-up than anything specific to Kublax. Of course to be fair, in any new venture all aspects of execution are at least as important as the idea and/or market opportunity and a two-legged stool won’t stand. Debating which leg is missing or broken and why is ultimately a somewhat irrelevant exercise. The reality is they didn’t make it happen. Nonetheless I feel badly for Tom and Sri, who I know put a lot of passion and effort into building Kublax and stayed focused and pragmatic to the end.
The general (ie non Kublax-specific) lesson that I would put at the heart of a case-study on Kublax is that capital is important. Now that might sound blindingly obvious – and of course it is – but stay with me. The lesson I see is that not all (‘tech’) start-ups can succeed bootstrapping a few hundred thousand pounds into a sustainable business model. As a relative outsider, I have and remained perplexed by the ‘one-size-fits-all’ capital model that seems pervasive in European venture capital, which often in reality turns into a feast or famine of capital for individual start-ups. Kublax was built on a shoestring and quite frankly it showed. The chicken never laid the egg and so the end became an inevitability. But I wonder if it could have been different.
You might be wondering why we didn’t invest in Kublax.* It really came down to one thing: we did not have the capital resources required to allow Kublax to hit ‘escape velocity’. I have looked very closely at Kublax over the last 18 months, and indeed we wanted to invest. However as a result of our analysis, we believed that the best risk/reward scenario would have required them to raise at least £2 million pounds and possibly as much as £5 million. Upfront. Not being in a position to provide this quantum of finance at the time, it would have been foolhardy to commit capital only to be ultimately at the mercy of other people’s investment committees. Further – and accuse me of hubris if you like – we felt strongly that our specific skills, knowledge and networks would be able to materially help the company successfully address some of it’s key strategic and operational challenges. However it would not have been economically rational for us to deploy these resources against only a modest investment. So we were confined to waiting on the touch line for others to drive the process. In the event, none did.
Lack of capital was not the only problem at Kublax, but I think the other key issues that the company faced could all have been addressed given sufficient capital. I will highlight four examples:
capital structure (specifically who owned how much and why)
management depth and experience (in particular in financial services)
product and user experience (never evolved beyond alpha quality); and
marketing and brand awareness
All of these issues could possibly have been solved with an appropriate infusion of capital from a serious and domain-knowledgeable investor. A cynic might point out that these four factors are pretty much the only four factors that matter so saying you would invest subject to being able to improve these is tantamount to saying you would invest if the company was ‘good.’ Well yes. Sort of. I think in the case of Kublax, the investment decision would have boiled down to a ‘build vs buy’ logic. Starting from scratch is hard and for all its faults, Kublax had done a lot of the basic plumbing (hard, unrewarding but necessary) and didn’t get a chance to start laying the tiles (hard but rewarding.) I find it hard to believe that asset is of no value.
In any event, given Kublax’s seedcamp pedigree, I imagine that most or all of the establishment London venture capital firms had the opportunity to look at Kublax. I think it would be very interesting and helpful to the broader UK/European start-up ecosystem to understand the key factors that informed their decisions to pass. Ask your favorite London VC to comment below.
So would we have invested if we had been in a position to underwrite a £2-5 million investment? Quite possibly. And indeed we would have made a determination on each of the four points above to really understand if these issues could be addressed, and the execution risk reduced accordingly. Alternatively we might have decided (and still might in the future) to incubate something similar ourselves.
In any event I wish Tom, Sri and the rest of the team at Kublax all the best for the future and hope they take away as many positives as possible from what must be a very disappointing outcome.
* I am referring here to what I call “Kublax Mark II” – in the early stages of the company’s life there were some clear management issues and dynamics that overshadowed the business and market opportunity. However seen from the outside, the company and it’s shareholders eventually addressed these issues and seemed to have a fresh start with some new investors coming on board and importantly a new CEO (Tom Symonds) early last year. It’s at this point we became interested (having explicitly passed a year earlier due to our lack of confidence in how the company was being managed.) Unfortunately one of the lessons is that it seems in the world of capital raising you often really do only get one chance to make a first impression…
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.
AMEE announced today that they had closed a new round of financing. I think this is a fascinating company and compelling opportunity. Given the chance, would I have for certain chosen to invest? Based on what I know of the company and its management, I would like to say yes. Probably. I’m forced to hedge my opinion because I just don’t know enough, especially with respect to the financials and the attractiveness of the valuation given the opportunity. But given what I do know, I would have loved to have them in our portfolio. And I’m certainly more than a little disappointed that we weren’t in a position to throw our hat in the ring, do our homework and at least make an offer…
Which brings me to an idea I’ve been toying with for the past several months. I’ve been contemplating publishing a virtual portfolio of venture and private equity investments – ie the investments we would likely have made (and would make) had we the capital available. A sort of an analogous take on Covestor or Marketocracy but for private investments.* There are however a number of reasons I have not taken the plunge. Perhaps most obviously is the issue of proprietary knowledge. After all, the heart of the value proposition we make to prospective investors is that we have a unique and robust investment thesis and that based on this foundation, we have identified (and will continue to identify) exciting young companies who are naturally adapted to grow and prosper in the coming years. If we tell everyone who these companies are, why would anyone need to pay us a fee? Why wouldn’t they just invest directly. Or more likely, why wouldn’t competing investors just ‘free-ride’ on our research and analysis, using our list as a filter or more? And what if the companies we listed failed (see below)? What benefit would there be to publishing such a list?
Further, there are a number of structural factors at work that mean that the ‘Covestor’ metaphor is imperfect at best and fundamentally inappropriate at worst. Investing in private companies involves a number of challenges that are different/additional to those faced by a public company investor. A number of these factors are interrelated but for the sake of clarity I’ll try to enumerate a few:
deep information deficit: for most of the companies that would appear on such a list, our information is significantly limited, especially with respect to financial aspects (budgets, sales, valuation, etc.) As a practical matter it is usually not possible to obtain this level of detailed information unless one is actively engaged with the company in view of a potential investment. Obviously it would be completely disingenuous for us to misrepresent our capacity and intentions simply in order to be able to put our slide-rule over the financial model. Further, without the potential pay-off of being able to follow through and invest in companies that pass due diligence and valuation muster, quite frankly we don’t have the luxury of doing such a deep analysis even if the company was happy to provide us the data.
price (valuation): while perhaps less important (within reason of course) the earlier you are in the life-cycle of a company, it is obviously a key input that is quite often unavailable. To be fair, one could possibly – at least for the purposes of such a list – assume that if respected investors participated in a given financing round that we would have been ok with the pricing too.
value enhancement: call it hubris if you like, but one of the key inputs in our investment process is understanding to what extent our participation as an investor can help reduce risk and accelerate success. Elements of this analysis can be done from ‘outside’ but without a deeper understanding of the business and in particular a personal relationship with the management team, it is hard to properly assess what value, if any, we can bring to the table. Some companies that look great to us from afar might just not be a good fit.
managing destiny: (a variation/specific case of the point above) particularly for seed and very early stage companies, one of the biggest risks they face is securing follow-on finance. In this context, a theoretical investment and a real investment are fundamentally different: there are many ways a company can fail. Failure is failure of course but I suspect there is a risk that some of the companies on our wish list might indeed fail to raise follow-on capital, whereas had we invested for real, we would be prepared to follow-on in most cases, mitigating if not eliminating this risk. Of course it’s probably impossible – even ex-post – to definitely identify companies whose failure was ultimately unavoidable (market driven) from those whose failure was only due to a financing gap.
The case for publishing such a list – assuming you can overcome some of the structural limitations outlined above – really boils down to building reputation and trust, both with potential investors and existing and aspiring entrepreneurs in particular and within the wider venture capital / private equity ecosystem in general. Part of me also likes to think that there is less risk, in terms of ‘giving away’ intellectual property, than would be the case for say a hedge fund manager focused on public equities: anyone can buy a public security, the same is not true of private companies. Wanting to invest is not sufficient to allow one to invest. Further, let’s be realistic: for better or worse, I’m not Warren Buffett or John Doerr or anyone really…will the fact that I say AMEE is a must own company really make a difference to anyone? More importantly (to me!), will it make it more or less likely that I will be able to use my skills to make a living identifying and investing in great young companies?
Basically the only potential downside to publishing a virtual or ‘wish-list’ portfolio I can see is the fact that one would have to assume that any nuance and qualifying information attached to such a list would ultimately get lost and that for better or worse, the companies would be inextricably linked to me without qualification. I was thinking that a list constructed as ‘Probables’ and ‘Possibles’ might just allow some useful qualification without diluting the impact. And yet, I hesitate. And I’m not sure why. So I thought I’d ask you.
Why should I not publish such a list?
What (if any) qualifications should I include, were I to publish such a list?
Why don’t other investors publish lists of deals they would like to or would have liked to have done? (before outcome is known of course!) (Or if any do, please tell me who/where.)
Five years ago I wrote a thought piece called ‘Through the Looking Glass’ to provoke non-linear thinking and foster debate on the possible future direction of the financial services industry and market structures. (I later turned it into a short video called AmazonBay.) It was a retrospective told from the point of view of an observer in 2015. It was never meant to be taken literally – in particular with respect to (most of) the specific corporate mergers – rather I used these as a concise and dramatic way of highlighting the possible or even probable consequence of the deep secular currents that I felt would inevitably work to reshape the landscape.
(December 2015:) …The global securities and investment banking groups that dominated the market in the last century are now extinct. In their place we have an intelligent galaxy of new specialist advisory, investment management, algorithmic software and consulting firms networked with a universe of powerful transaction facilitation exchanges. Banks now exist only as giant regulated pools of capital.
Following the sweeping banking reforms proposed last week by President Obama, and the fact that we are now halfway to this hypothetical future, I thought it might be worth doing a quick mark-to-market of how my ideas have lined up with reality.
Oracle
stock exchange consolidation and emergence of new exchange venues (A-) pretty close both in outcomes and timing – the major stock exchanges have been merging a-go-go while at the same time new trading venues have proliferated, and exchange (or quasi-exchange) trading of new asset classes continues to develop strongly.
sports/outcome trading in US legitimized (B-) my narrative had this happening in February 2010, not there yet but Congressman Frank’s bill might open the doors later this year and the trend seems to be on the right track and will probably be signed into law by Obama (!); as an aside was way early on a Betfair IPO…
giant bank mergers followed by break-up of vertically integrated universal banks, with Goldman Sachs leading the way (A) we have seen the big get mostly even bigger (RBS/ABN, BoA/ML, Barclays/Lehman…and while JPMorgan didn’t buy MS, they did get Bear Stearns and WaMu); GS hasn’t yet broken itself into three as predicted but I’m still confident it will lead the way when/if industry structure changes, and more generally the trend of regulatory thinking across the globe is definitely a trailing wind for the kind of change I envisioned. The 2010-2012 timeframe for the re-organization of global banks is probably a bit early but plausibility has certainly gone up (from near zero) significantly since I wrote this.
more (and more) algorithmic / automated intermediation of markets (A-) this was obliquely referenced in my article but was really at the heart of the idea that this fictional ‘AmazonBay’ platform would end up dominating this aspect of markets; clearly the market is heading this way – in fact it may seem obvious now but most people did not fully understand this even as little as five years ago.
Amazon anything (B+) The jury is probably still out on this one, but in my view it is looking increasingly likely that Amazon.com will become a giant of the next economic paradigm; whether or not they use their vast intellectual and technological resources to participate more directly in the financial services arena is not yet clear, but I can tell you the only ‘big company’ job I would not hesitate for two minutes to accept if it were offered would be CEO or CSO of Amazon Financial Services (AFS) Jeff are you listening?
(Note: Remember I used real company names mainly to add vividness to the ideas underlying the narrative. The key concept I wanted to convey with this GS break-up vignette was that the vertically integrated model would decompose under the light of new technology and regulations into a (technology-centric) Sales & Trading component, a more focused, relationship driven Advisory component (cf. the emerging proliferation of pure advisory ’boutiques’) and independent, conflict-free Asset Management businesses (cf. the secular growth of hedge funds and Barclays sale of BGI, etc.))
(February 2009:) …Reacting to new competition, Goldman Sachs becomes the first major investment bank to break itself up. Securities and distribution are sold to Ebay Financial Markets, while the remaining activities are split into two new companies: GS Advisory Services and GS Capital management…
Charlatan
eBay anything (D) Despite the fact that the actual companies cited are more symbolic than literal, the choice of eBay to represent the cutting edge of online, data-driven, algorithmic marketplaces was simply awful. To the extent that it risks distracting the viewer from the key, underlying messages. It is now entirely implausible and so instead of bridging the cognitive gap, the inclusion of eBay simply extends it. Thank goodness this is somewhat mitigated by my inclusion of Amazon.com (see above) as the other new markets avatar but they come late to the narrative…
sports trading developing as an asset class (C+) this clearly hasn’t happened, although there are one or two small funds and firms offering managed accounts; and a vibrant ecosystem of professional traders and the associated software has emerged around the Betfair and other exchange platforms. In my defense, I picked sports as just a provocative and emotionally attractive example of the idea that – enabled by technology – a vast array of new tradable markets in goods but also outcomes, would emerge. Work in progress.
credit crunch and asset bubbles (D) although the overall purpose of the piece was to provoke thinking on the sustainability of existing business models in financial services in the face of radically shifting underlying technological, economic and demographic trends, I failed to include a thread touching on the possibility of catastrophic systemic discontinuities arising as a result of the prevailing market structure and business models. It’s a significant ommission, especially as at the time of writing this I was in the process of exiting my former responsibilities as a senior executive in the credit business due in part to my increasing discomfort with the sustainability and prudence of the risk pricing in that market.
All in all, I would give myself a mid-term grade of B+/A- with room both to improve and to slip back. Mostly on the right track, especially with respect to big themes but perhaps a bit optimistic in terms of some of the timelines. What do you think? Better? Worse? To be fair, the correct measuring stick is not so much whether or not I was right or wrong, even in terms of ‘macro’ predictions but whether or not this article and video helped catalyze serious discussion, debate and thought about the potential for disruptive and non-linear change in the financial services industry. Alas I have no idea how one could even attempt to measure that, but any thoughts or anecdotes you might have with respect to this would of course be appreciated.
I would set upon transforming the company into a retail financial services powerhouse, focusing in particular on developing markets like India and Brazil; and
I don’t have time to articulate the whole thesis here (and besides, if they want the whole thesis they can hire me!) There are some hints in my Platforms, markets and bytes presentation.
All this will no doubt help Nokia come up with better, if not magic, products. The firm may even reach its goal of 300m users by the end of 2011 because its efforts are not aimed just at rich countries, but at fast-growing emerging economies where Nokia is still king of the hill, such as India. There, services such as Nokia Money, a mobile-payment system, and Life Tools, which supplies farmers with prices and other information, fulfil real needs, says John Delaney of IDC, another market-research firm.
Which only strengthens my view that their path to salvation lies in (yet another) complete re-invention, this time to a 21st century, sixth paradigm, retail financial services platform (built on a mobile substrate.) They might even want to keep (at least some of) their handset engineering know-how: it might come in handy for building handsets that are particularly well adapted to mobile financial services.
In any event, if Nokia want their share price to go up, they better hurry up and change their frame of reference. I mean really, who would you rather compete with? Apple? Google?
One of the downsides of having a reasonably ‘international’ life is having to manage foreign exchange risks and effect international currency transfers and payments reasonable regularly. If you only do this once every few years for a few thousand pounds/dollars/euros/etc., you may not notice or care that your bank generally makes this quite hard to do and charges you an arm and a leg for the pleasure (no commission is just dishonest marketing-speak.) If however, you need to make a few foreign currency payments or transfers each year; and/or you have more significant sums at stake, your bank is probably not the best place to do your FX business.
You could (and perhaps do, as I did) use one of the literally hundreds of FX brokers, and if you have the time, knowledge of spot rates and inclination to haggle and shop around, you will get a good price. For a transfer of £10,000 for example you could easily save on the order of £100 or more compared to your bank. However (aside from needing the time, skill and energy to haggle and shop around), in my experience that is the easy part. It is only once you have traded that the fun really starts. Faxes, printing pdfs, clunky websites… getting your money to the broker and then back out in the new currency to the destination account is all too often a long and painful experience. Not completely surprising given the traditional business culture found in financial services: the trade is done (and revenue is booked), the rest is just ‘back office’, paperwork…boring. But from a customer point of view, this is upside-down: the trade is the easy part, undifferentiated, relatively painless (notwithstanding the see-what-you-can-get-away-with pricing algorithms of most of the industry.) Your time (and mental health!) is valuable, being able to trade painlessly in just seconds is often times as valuable or more than a tight price. In any event, you shouldn’t have to choose between them, and now you no longer need to.
So when an ex-colleague of mine Nigel Verdon came to me with a new concept in FX payments and broking, one that was predicated on transparency, simplicity and automation, I listened. I liked what I heard and I became one of the first guinea pigs customers. I liked it so much, I bought (a stake in) the company. The company of course is FX Capital Group which I’ve written about previously, here and here. Nigel and his team have built an extremely robust and technologically modern FX payments platform that essentially acts as middleware between any end user and their bank accounts and the enormous and highly efficient wholesale, interbank currency markets. On top of this platform, they have built two applications: FX Capital – adapted for corporate customers, and RabbitFX for private clients. In the coming weeks, they will also release their API, with the clear objective of allowing anyone to embed FX and international payments into their website, workflow or application. Indeed, one of the first target markets for their platform technology is the hundreds of FX brokers who currently struggle with poor or non-existent technology. By allowing them to focus on what they do best (generally distribution – client acquisition and relationship management) and improve the level of service to their customers by outsourcing the technology to FXCG, everyone – client, broker, FXCG – is a winner. Think of it as FXaaS (FX as a Service.)
…[FX Capital Group provides] FX-as-a-Service.
The reason for today’s post however is to announce the new RabbitFX website, which I hope you will agree looks fantastic and even more importantly is easy to use and understand. It’s not perfect (still lots of improvements and features in the pipeline) but we think it is ‘good enough’: we are confident that the user experience is better than any other specialist FX broker in the market. And this starts right from the beginning: sign up for an account today and you’ll see what I mean. For UK customers, you should be able to get everything done online; customers based outside the UK (and some UK customers) can do 90% online and will need to send some identity documentation (in order for RabbitFX to fulfill its ‘know-your-customer’ regulatory requirements.) And once your account is open, I’m sure you’ll find like I did that making a FX payment has never been easier.
I thought I’d play a little markets jeopardy with the headline to this post. The question of course is: “what would happen if Google stopped mucking around and just came out and said it?” Said they were going to take their massive dataset, brilliant algorithms and (hire) all the smartest people in all the lands and offer a free service to “do anything anyone anywhere might conceivably want to do.” That should be enough to cast a pall over even the most profitable or promising companies. Sell everything (else) and buy Google, right?
Many of you are of course thinking no, not right: the premise is far-fetched (not to say ridiculous) and even if you accept it in the spirit of the thought experiment it so obviously is, the conclusion – that they take out every other competitor at the kneecaps – is not a given by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, when Google announced that they were going to launch a free property listing plug-in to enhance their UK maps product, the market reacted pretty much as if Google were indeed Merlin the Magician and just by waving it’s googly wand it could take over any market at will just by unleashing its fierce intellect and sizzling technology on the hapless incumbents. In this particular instance, Rightmove‘s (the leading UK property portal) shares collapsed on the news trading down 10% on the day and c. 15% in all since the story broke. Now to be fair, having traded as low as 156p at the start of the year, RMV shares have had a pretty solid 2009, hitting a high of just over 600p and trading around 550p before the Google ‘news’ hit the market. And since investing (and especially trading) is not about picking the prettiest asset but picking the asset you think most others will find prettiest, I don’t blame any fund manager for selling first and asking questions later. And I have much sympathy for those that think that Rightmove’s market leadership is vulnerable in the medium term; only I don’t harbor much fear that this threat will come from Mountainview. The competitor that Rightmove’s shareholders should be keeping a close eye on isn’t Google, but Zoopla of course. (Reminder: we are investors in Zoopla.) Ah, but Zoopla has a silly name, it can’t be a real threat. Google however…
And it’s not just UK property where I think the mainstream markets and pundits breathlessly get it wrong about Google. In area after area they have proven not to be a very successful or threatening competitor and in other areas their entry has often been a boon for specialist competitors in the segment due to the legitimizing power Google brings to the table. They are able to (implicitly) validate new business models in ways a smaller, more specialist start-up could never dream of, and yet this market validation very often plays right into the hands of folks who, well, know what the hell they are doing.
Don’t believe me? Let’s take just a couple areas where – if you believe the logic in the argument used to justify Rightmove‘s downtrade – Google should be causing wholesale panic and disruption:
Financial Information: maybe I’m wrong but I don’t exactly see Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg shaking in their boots, and yet here is a sector that is tailor made for Google’s engineering, distribution and technology assets, and one where they have had years to refine the value proposition; and yet Google Finance remains essentially a working prototype of a back-of-the-napkin sketch of what a Google financial information portal could become. Umair challenged CEO Schmidt to take up this challenge a couple months ago but I’m not convinced it would be as easy as it looks.
News aggregators: Google News is all we need right? (Perhaps supplemented with Google Reader…) There’s no reason for sites like Digg or Daylife or the Huffington Post to exist. I mean what are these guys thinking: some of them even started after Google News went into public beta. Crazy. Except they actually work, they have customers willing to use them despite Google News existing. But really, how long can this last?
Advertising: I must be joking now. After all advertising is the one market Google owns; the market that gave them their billions that allowed them to hire all the smart (non-evil) people and enter and take any other market at will. Right? Well if you think so, have a look at this recent post from Paul Kedrosky. It’s why vertical search and specialist sites exist. It’s why you (usually) go to Amazon.com if you know you are searching for a book, and not necessarily via Google.
And I could go on. But the point of this post is not to say that Google are useless, yesterday’s game, past their prime. In fact my best Google-fanboy guess would be that they are far from the point of diminishing returns and structural foolishness. My point is rather that they are not – or at least not universally – the ‘destroyers of all economic worlds’; that as they grow to become a company of thousands of employees in dozens of locations they will inevitably have to deal with some of the structural pathologies that this involves, including rising mediocracy and products looking more like camels than horses. Oh yeah and evil too. Yes they are a fierce competitor and certainly there is some risk that they could destroy your business model and take your business with it. But this is far from certain. They are human. They make mistakes. They execute poorly. They don’t always (or even often) win. And best of all, once you’ve proven that you can beat them, they just might buy your company.
Update:
I forgot to send you to a great essay by John Borthwick, thinking about the challenges Google faces going forward and highlighting the structural shortcomings of trying to regulate behavior in the fast moving world of technology, inspired by Ken Auletta’s book Googled: The End of the World As We Know It.
And of course Jeff Jarvis wrote a book about the opening premise of this post (which perhaps Santa will bring me) called What Would Google Do?
I have long been concerned by the rise and rise of the global mega-bank, first due to my conviction of the impossibility of managing such complex behemoths (with the dangers as we all now know having repercussions far beyond any individual bank’s shareholders or creditors) and also due to the increasing rents such a de facto oligopoly could (and so logically does) extract from the rest of the global economy. I’ve started and then stopped writing this post at least half a dozen times in the past year; partly due to a sense of ‘what’s the point’, partly due to the problem being covered by many with much (much) more influence than I, and partly (I’m somewhat ashamed to admit) due to a small underlying element of self-censorship. As some of you know, we have ambitions to raise capital to allow us to catalyze the re-invention of financial services by investing in companies with disruptive new business models in this sector, and well the big banks are not only potential sources of capital in their own right, but also have significant influence with many of the people and institutions who are potential sources of capital for us. As regular readers know, I try always to tell it like I see it but if I’m objective, I probably have had a tendency to pull my punches a bit when discussing the banking industry. But as the debate on reforming global banking takes centre stage, and at the risk of annoying some of our potential future investors with a dissident opinion, I thought it would be worthwhile to lay out my key thoughts on the subject.
Weak competition is obvious to customers: financial companies demand high fees that are often calculated according to illogical tariffs. Fund managers’ charges, for example, are usually large and are often not linked to the quality, or the real costs of their services.
The lack of competition shows up to economists in the sector’s staggering profitability. In the second quarter of 2009, 29 per cent of US domestic profits came from finance. The profit-generating power of financial companies across the developed world has stubbornly remained higher than that of other companies.
There is, in addition, good reason to suppose that competitive pressures will weaken further. The recent wave of bank failures and mergers, born of the crisis, have left the sector more concentrated. With fewer players on the field – many enjoying implicit state guarantees – competition will be further enfeebled.
But in more advanced economies, rent-seeking takes more sophisticated forms. Instead of 10 per cent on arms sales, we have 7 per cent on new issues. Rents are often extracted indirectly from consumers rather than directly from government: as in protection from competition from foreign goods and new entrants, and the clamour for the extension of intellectual property rights. Rents can also be secured through overpaid employment in overmanned government activities.
Rent-seeking is found whenever economic power is concentrated – in the state, in large private business, in groups of co-operating and colluding firms. Private concentrations of economic power tend to be self-reinforcing. This problem was widely recognised in America’s gilded age. The well-founded fear was that the new mega-rich – the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Vanderbilts – would use their wealth to enhance their political influence and grow their economic power, subverting both the market and democracy. Today it is Russia that exemplifies this problem.
But America has a new generation of rent-seekers. The modern equivalents of castles on the Rhine are first-class lounges and corporate jets. Their occupants are investment bankers and corporate executives.
So much of the conversation seems to revolve around this question of how do we deal with financial institutions which are “too big to fail”, with the turkeys running the world’s mega-banks almost unanimously (and somewhat breathlessly) insisting that breaking banks up would achieve nothing except to hurt customers.
Back in June, I set down my thoughts on what the key issues were in terms of (fixing) banking regulation, highlighting that size (of assets or business) was not the only variable to consider when assessing systemic risk, but that ‘connectedness’ was probably even more important. Certainly the combination of both is something that should ring alarm bells.
Wouldn’t it make much more sense to build a set of rules that explicitly addresses the vulnerabilities of a scale free network and as such focuses disproportion attention and resources on protecting the hubs from attack or failure. The beauty is that the digital global financial system of the 21st century and advances in the science of networks actually now allows us to do this: we can empirically and quantitatively observe, measure and manage the ‘connectedness’ of institutions. Forget the rating agencies, companies like Bonabeau’s IcoSystems and others could help the regulators create, maintain and monitor network ‘maps’ and score each market participant in terms of their connectivity. This should be the defining core metric of financial regulation and mirroring the power law distribution of the underlying network, financial regulation should focus its attention and resources in geometrically increasing fashion.
However it’s pretty frustrating to continue to read much of the ‘financial establishment’ – people who have the luxury and the privilege of being able to speak from the pages of the FT – continue to miss the point entirely and cling to a (slighty) new and improved version of the regulatory status quo. I have enormous respect for Jamie Dimon, and while I agree with him that the system must be re-engineered so as to allow any bank of any size to fail without jeopardizing the system, I disagree that breaking up the biggest banks would be damaging and serve no purpose. The rules need to be reset (to build-in automatic and steeply increasing impediments to growth in size and connectedness), but at the same time the biggest global and domestic mega-banks need to be pruned back to a size that is commensurate with this new paradigm.
The parallels between the rise and rise of Standard Oil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its subsequent government mandated break-up and the rise and rise of giant global banks in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are real. John D. Rockefeller sounded every bit as sincere and paternalistic in calling for an ever bigger, ever more dominant Standard Oil – a company that would bring ‘order’ and ‘stability’ to the market making customers’ lives and choices ‘easier.’ Well of course we know that the market for oil products didn’t suffer as a result of the break-up of Standard Oil, nor did anarchy descend on the US telecommunications markets following the break-up of AT&T. I think you’ll actually find that there is a decent case to be made that things got better in both cases, with more robust and innovative markets and better value for customers. (I highly recommend that legislators everywhere take a moment to read Chernow’s great Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. before reaching their conclusions as to the merits (or not) of breaking up the biggest banks.)
But the most important long-term reason to consider government intervention in the size and power of the world’s largest financial institutions is that failing to do so will inevitably starve one of the key sectors of the economy of innovation and progress with increasingly damaging results. Indeed, in the conclusion to his column Mr. Kay hits the nail on the head:
Because innovation is dependent on new entry it is essential to resist concentration of economic power. A stance which is pro-business must be distinguished from a stance which is pro-market. In the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that distinction has not been appreciated well enough.
It’s time for a change. It’s time to shake things up a bit. No?
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)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=92627a3a-d117-4a17-adbd-e36fdd4dd279)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=35a6ad52-3063-4ef3-8a1a-119bb62ae260)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=5e0035c5-b888-49bb-b8b8-a15574c6097c)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=8bd020e0-e5ad-4ce1-b7b6-67d73dd3808c)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=a433372a-261d-4f6b-a992-de776f0e46a5)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=c757d5bd-2f5d-48b5-80a9-4da1c4bfc3b3)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=a98297e9-bada-443a-896d-7f557c312e6a)
before reaching their conclusions as to the merits (or not) of breaking up the biggest banks.)![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=e5e8ed9f-c025-4930-b9a6-b7040251e6f4)
