"... so I was invited to speak at Stanford the other day...", that surely is a catch phrase, isn't it...? Well, I am now entitled to use it from today on... But let's start from the beginning - for some time already I have been in touch with professor Burton Lee from Stanford's School of Engineering, I believe we met on LinkedIn... Burton is generally very interested in exploring European Entrepreneurship and he created a weekly series of lectures (which actually serves also as a class Mechanical Engineering - ME421) where he invites interesting people around entrepreneurship in Europe... Interesting thing here in Silicon Valley...
And this time, because I am in the Valley, Burton also invited me to say a few words on innovation and VC in the Czech Republic... Quite funny for me because 1) this time the event was focused on Finland as one of the partners is Finnode, 2) the main focus was supposed to be on universities (not my favourite topic)... Anyway, this was what it was, and I was certainly not to lose my once-in-a-lifetime (well, who knows) opportunity to be able to be telling to people the first sentence of this post... :-)
Anyway, I should also mention the other speakers - I was happy to meet two Finnish guys (again, it was a "Finnish day"): Jouko Salo of Tekes/Finnode introduced the agency and mainly their Silicon Valley presence... The second speaker was then presenting a Finnish startup with global ambitions - I don't remember exactly what makes them so exceptional because a part of the presentation was a video... and it didn't work... which took us about 7 mins to discover (a lot of trying and silence) and so he just lost my attention... But I believe the company, apart from their silly domain MultiTou.ch (it is called MultiTouch), is very interesting, with ability to produce very large touch screens...
The best part of the event was the following - Burton was lucky to get as another speaker professor Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli who now teaches at UC Berkeley (another famous university in the Bay area), but before that he was an entrepreneur - he founded and managed Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys... two huge names from the EDA world, actually I believe they are now the largest two EDA companies in the world...
Professor Sangiovanni talked about innovations and innovativeness in Italy - and I actually found many similarities to the Czech Republic situation... Undeveloped ecosystem, rigorous univeristies' environment, lack of entrepreneurship, lack of innovation in corporations... One thing different in Italy to the Czech Republic is the growing activity of venture capital in Italy (which unfortunately we cannot say)...
Professor had some very interesting remarks and points, let me briefly pick a couple of them:
- funding from the government usually rather distracts the market instead of stimulating it,
- top-down approach in supporting entrepreneurship and innovation cannot work,
- how can anybody even think that some governmental activity can enforce innovation,
- too much VC also destroys innovation as if there is too much of capital, too much crap gets financing, too many "me-too's",
- studying MBA is interesting, but never leads to innovation; just a lot of talking about it...
Very interesting gig, really...
And my presentation...? I believe slides should be available soon at the EEITL web site, as well as part of the event on video... Just a quick note replying to Alberto's point about VC in Italy... During his presentation I looked up statistics for VC in the Czech Republic in 2008... Total money invested in VC and PE (so including buy-outs) was € 57 million... Out of this number the total invested in seed and startups was ZERO... Total invested in growth: € 16 million in 3 deals (out of which 1 should be "my" INVIA.CZ, the other two I really don't know)... Oh My God...
And this time, because I am in the Valley, Burton also invited me to say a few words on innovation and VC in the Czech Republic... Quite funny for me because 1) this time the event was focused on Finland as one of the partners is Finnode, 2) the main focus was supposed to be on universities (not my favourite topic)... Anyway, this was what it was, and I was certainly not to lose my once-in-a-lifetime (well, who knows) opportunity to be able to be telling to people the first sentence of this post... :-)Anyway, I should also mention the other speakers - I was happy to meet two Finnish guys (again, it was a "Finnish day"): Jouko Salo of Tekes/Finnode introduced the agency and mainly their Silicon Valley presence... The second speaker was then presenting a Finnish startup with global ambitions - I don't remember exactly what makes them so exceptional because a part of the presentation was a video... and it didn't work... which took us about 7 mins to discover (a lot of trying and silence) and so he just lost my attention... But I believe the company, apart from their silly domain MultiTou.ch (it is called MultiTouch), is very interesting, with ability to produce very large touch screens...
The best part of the event was the following - Burton was lucky to get as another speaker professor Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli who now teaches at UC Berkeley (another famous university in the Bay area), but before that he was an entrepreneur - he founded and managed Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys... two huge names from the EDA world, actually I believe they are now the largest two EDA companies in the world...
Professor Sangiovanni talked about innovations and innovativeness in Italy - and I actually found many similarities to the Czech Republic situation... Undeveloped ecosystem, rigorous univeristies' environment, lack of entrepreneurship, lack of innovation in corporations... One thing different in Italy to the Czech Republic is the growing activity of venture capital in Italy (which unfortunately we cannot say)...
Professor had some very interesting remarks and points, let me briefly pick a couple of them:
- funding from the government usually rather distracts the market instead of stimulating it,
- top-down approach in supporting entrepreneurship and innovation cannot work,
- how can anybody even think that some governmental activity can enforce innovation,
- too much VC also destroys innovation as if there is too much of capital, too much crap gets financing, too many "me-too's",
- studying MBA is interesting, but never leads to innovation; just a lot of talking about it...
Very interesting gig, really...
And my presentation...? I believe slides should be available soon at the EEITL web site, as well as part of the event on video... Just a quick note replying to Alberto's point about VC in Italy... During his presentation I looked up statistics for VC in the Czech Republic in 2008... Total money invested in VC and PE (so including buy-outs) was € 57 million... Out of this number the total invested in seed and startups was ZERO... Total invested in growth: € 16 million in 3 deals (out of which 1 should be "my" INVIA.CZ, the other two I really don't know)... Oh My God...
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