Finance
start-up around the London VC scene, and one by one, each VC asked the founder when he was going to get a real CEO in to run the business.
As we would leave these
venture firms, he would turn to me and say, “Julie, take their name off the list; we’ll send them the press release when we go public for a billion.”
The entrepreneur did indeed
go public, and sold his firm to an industry player for $600 million within a decade of having founded it. He is widely perceived as one of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs, and yet more than a dozen VC’s in 1998 discounted his ability to become a good CEO.
So what’s the answer? I think it’s really very simple: follow the entrepreneur. He/she has the market insight. He/she has creative genius. He/she is the hero.
Throughout history, capital has always followed the ideas and those with the ideas who have shaped the era. Whether it was Michaelangelo or Christopher Columbus, the financiers of the day knew that it was really the adventurers, artists, creators who were building the future, not themselves as the financiers.
In fact, money is like a heat-seeking missile – searching for the best return. What fascinates me about the much- trumpeted financial services industry in the UK, is that it has forgotten that it isn’t an industry. It is a service industry to industry. The proper role of the financier or venture capitalist is to find the industrialists of the day and to back them. When they move outside of that scope, when they don’t risk their own capital, and they don’t align themselves with the growth plans of the industrialists that they back, then bad things happen which destroy economies and tear apart societies.
So I argue that we must get back to basics. As a venture capitalist, it is not your job to be the smartest guy in the room, but to find her (or him). Your job is not to thump the table and demand to know where the sales are, but to free up the CEO/entrepreneur to not worry that he/she will be tossed out or crushed by the venture firm so that he is capable of closing big deals for the firm.
Europe and the UK are being redefined by their entrepreneurs at this time. We are fortunate indeed that there exists a group of people who are willing to live abnormal lives to bring the future to us. For all of society benefits when one of them breaks through, and when a team tastes financial success. All of society benefits when a supernova exit occurs and that man or that woman can plough his capital gains back into backing the next crazy guy who’s willing to live an abnormal life….
31 entrepreneurcountry
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