Philip’s blog

No sign of the business creation team at CUTEC for all the talk of business ideas coming out of the University.  Disappointing that neither of the two investments which the team (ten people?) made in the last report filed were not high-lighted.  Perhaps next year we will see the fruits of all their hard work! 

Mind you, they do not stand much chance when the likes of Kleiner Perkins hop over from the USA and sign companies up in the labs.

Sometimes you go to conferences and it is so dull.  At CUTEC the organisers had done the hard work and put together some great panels.  “Funding and Early-Stage Innovations” had:

- Anne Glover, Amadeus, better know as Herman Hauser’s VC company

- Saul Klein, Index Ventures, just out of Skype and last.fm

- Robert Sansom, Cambridge Angels

- Laurence Garrett, partner of 3i

- Alain-Gabriel Courtines, Intel Capital

- Christopher Spray, Atlas Ventures, who bought modern VCs to the UK.

All brilliant.  Saul so modest but showed his mettle when taken to task by Geoff Jones.  Geoff was very impressed.  Index Ventures should run CUTEC next year!!  Saul said web1.0 was very USA based whereas web2.0 is about a global comunity.

Laurence Garrett asked why would anyone with any sense want to be an entrepreneur!  Great entrepreneurs need great VCs to turn down big offers on the road to stardom as with CSR.

Prior to 2002, the Cambridge Cluster was powered by one angel, Herman Hauser.  He is now joined by Cambridge Angels which has invested £10million in 24 businesses.  Let us hope that they have a big pay-day soon to keep re-cycling the funds.

Robert Sansom is the chair and founder of Cambridge Angels.  He built up and sold FORE Systems for $4billion. 

Pearls from Robert:

- King’s Cross will be the next big cluster in the UK; lots of offices and rail links

- angels invest in groups to make sure the pockets rules the heart!

- never easy to raise money, make the entrepreneur work!

 Five types of business:

- no investment, service, financed by customers

- angels only as no huge exit

- angels and VC if big uplift in value after angel round

- only VCs like chip companies as angels will always lose out

- those that should never be started; “It will never work!”

All summed up in Dill’s brilliant illustration, the Journey Planner.  The last ones are digging the hole in the ground!

Great CUTEC event in Cambridge with inspirational talks from Seth Sternberg of Meebo and Martin Varsakvsky of FON. 

Meebo is Seth and his team’s third attempt at a web2.0 site.  They started up whilst working for others and taking great care not to use any of their employees time and resources.  Then a small angel round with three people, lots of traction and then the $3millin VC round.  Now they are in the big time.

Martin just gives an inspirational talk - is YouTube still only in English?  So many leassons learnt.  Wish you had been there?

Here is our top “Hat Tip” at reboot 2007 in Copenhagen.  Hope to meet Geofones soon to catch up on all the latest news and views.

Grant  sent me some great pictures of the Northern Lights - a trip of a lifetime for a very special person.

Geoff gave me a great link to Joi Ito which led me to this fantastic interview by two giants of the world, people who have really changed our lives, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

It is an amazing inteview which finishes with a standing ovation.  It must last for nearly one hour and has been chopped into ten minute sections.  Well worth a visit.

Suprising how much they have worked together over the years.

Hat tip: Geoff Jones

alarm:clock snags a great article on Equity Fingerprint and finishes with the following comment: “Getting the equity thing right is often neglected. We’ve met enough demotivated founders, pissed off angels, and VC-haters over the years to vouch for that notion”.

We must be getting something right.  The article led to over 100 hits on the site.

I found out about it because of Google Alert.