Monday, January 5, 2009

The Primacy of the New Tool


Steven Chu, Nobel Prize winner and Energy Secretary designate, gave a fascinating interview at UC Berkeley recently. There is a particular section that I found to be deeply insightful and relevant to the Venture Capital business. I quote from this section beginning at about minute 48:

“The lesson I learned is that you don’t even have to be brilliant if you are the first to look at something with a new tool… What are the new tools…? Let’s figure out something to do with it…

If you use an old tool to tackle a problem you’ve got to be really smarter than the rest of the folks because everybody has this tool. If you are the first to look with something new it’s like starting a new world. You just look around and everything you see is going to be new.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-7gWsoXtUw

He goes on to explain how he applied some new science to develop some very powerful solutions to important problems. He explains that it does little good to start with the problem. Without a new tool you only have conventional and well travelled paths to address it. It may not be obvious what problem exists and can be solved but starting with a new tool gives you a chance to create something truly disruptive.

The history of innovation is replete with examples of the primacy of the new tool. It probably begins with fire. The printing press, the water wheel, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, electricity, the electric motor etc. etc. Each of these fundamental inventions gave rise to an era of new inventions addressing applications which could not have been conceived before the technology. Who would have ever considered the automobile before the existence of the engine? Wiring of the world to power light bulbs provided the foundation for thousands of electrical appliances that surround us every day of our lives.

Institutional Venture Capital

Venture capital with a small c has been a part of the world for hundreds of years. Queen Isabella provided the seed capital that got Columbus onto the water.

Venture Capital as an industry began in the 1960s. This was a magical time. The post war economic recovery was in full swing. The transistor was the first seed of this reality and integrated circuits were just emerging. The earliest computers were providing a clumsy but very useful model for applying electronic computation and “software” to solve difficult problems. The transistor, the integrated circuit, the minicomputer, the PC, the hard disk, Ethernet, wireless telephony and networking, the internet emerged in a continuous stream. Each of these fundamental new tools created a “new world” of opportunities to create disruptive solutions. As the tools matured and grew more powerful the solutions they enabled became more and more pervasive. As Steven Chu observed, “You don’t have to be brilliant if you are the first to look at something with a new tool”. The breadth and depth of the new field of opportunities opened up by these tools was probably unique in history. Tens of thousands of entrepreneurs started tens of thousands of startups, fueled by a rapidly growing Venture Capital industry. These startups turned into Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Amazon, Apple etc. etc. Countless smaller companies also participated and became part of the wave of technology that has inundated our daily lives. Technology grew from essentially zero to represent nearly 35% of the US GDP. Billions of dollars were invested and billions were returned to smart and lucky investors. The golden years!

Hitting the wall

The San Jose Mercury published a graph of venture backed IPO recently:


The decade from 1991 to 2000 produced nearly 500 IPOs. The decade from 2001 to present has produced 88. 2008 produced 1 IPO and 2009 doesn’t look much better. What has happened? I do not have data on hand for venture capital returns but I would bet that overall returns since 2000 have been very strongly negative.

Some folks blame the economy or other transitory exogenous factors. I believe that there is a much more fundamental and intrinsic factor at work.

The Sudden Absence of New Tools

The waterfall of new tools that started with the transistor in the 1960s has slowed to a trickle. The technology industry is, as a result, consolidating with a handful of monster players controlling the path to market for almost all technologies. Refining the old tools has become a business requiring massive injections of capital and long incubation periods. A new startup “has to be really smarter than the rest of the folks because everyone has this tool”. There are a few of these but nowhere near enough to support the massive scale that the Venture Capital industry has achieved. As a result there are billions of dollars chasing a small and declining base of quality deals.

Why has the emergence of new technologies declined so significantly? My guess is that it is a macro level systems phenomenon. Stephen Jay Gould developed the now standard evolutionary theory of “Punctuated Equilibrium”.

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_structure.html

In essence he observed that evolution was not a smooth and continuous series of gradual changes. Instead it was marked by long periods of near complete stability, punctuated by brief periods of rapid and fundamental change. I suspect that many systems follow this same model, including innovation. The burst of invention and commercial success which was initiated by the invention of the transistor has run its course. The changes are not over but the rate of change has slowed dramatically and the difficulty faced by a “new species” in the resulting ecology is dramatically greater (survival rate is far lower). The rapid evolution of new tools is over and will not resume until and unless there is another fundamental technology innovation comparable to the transistor.

An Industry in Denial

I know of no example of an industry which conducted an orderly and systematic downsizing when the opportunity it addressed disappeared or radically changed. We can look around at the auto and recording industries for recent tragedies. The Venture Capital industry is no exception. Instead of recognizing the hand writing on the wall, VCs are inventing new places to put money and trumpeting the “opportunity” they represent.

The Clean-Tech Mirage

One of the most outrageous of these is “Clean-tech”. Is there a market for Clean-tech? Probably. Will there be a few companies created which succeed. Probably. Is there a fundamentally new tool that creates the dynamic required for a large scale venture capital industry to thrive and provide good returns? NO!!

Without a new tool you struggle with Steven Chu’s dilemma. You have to be “smarter than the rest of the folks”. A few may leap over that hurdle but the folks running Exxon, Shell, General Electric and other majors have the same tools, by and large and they are just as smart, they are far more nimble than they were 30 years ago, they have access to far greater resources and they have far broader market reach. According to the Mercury News the Venture Capital industry invested $6 Billion in 2007 and $8 billion in 2008 in Clean-tech. My guess is that the returns will be a very small fraction of that amount.

Epilog

There is still a market for venture capital with a small c. Innovation is not dead. Smaller new tools emerge around the fringe of the market every day. A few of the big C investments will work but the Venture Capital industry as a whole will destroy billions and billions of dollars of investor’s capital in the post 2000 meltdown. I guess the good news is that, however big the capital destruction is, it will be a drop in the bucket compared to that recently achieved by the real masters of the universe, the Wall Street bankers.

If and when venture capital returns to its roots it will recover its business value. The new "micro-venture" model is: to start a very small fund (perhaps a separate fund for each separate investment); to include a significant amount of the general partner's own money; to make small investments in capital efficient businesses which can become profitable early and with no more than a couple of million dollars; and to pay the general partner exclusively with carried interest after the principal have been returned to the investors. Small startup opportunities exist and are ignored by the big-fund coupon clippers. If you can find (or start) a micro-venture fund, with good solid partners, you can still make an (admitedly smaller) investment in the venture capital sector with a reasonable expectation of an appropriate return.

74 comments:

  1. What do you think of this?

    http://www.me-vc.com

    It's not valid for U.S. companies, however.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Any chance that innovation has not slowed at all, but rather that the cutting edge of innovation has moved to a place with low capital requirements? Three awesome coders can get a great web app going without selling out to any money devils.

    Innovation is speeding up, and with each new round, it's easier to cut out the money on the next round.

    stupid?

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  3. Do semantic / AI / Natural Language Processing technologies that analyze the written/spoken word qualify as a new "tool"?

    http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_more_semantic_apps_to_watch.php

    ReplyDelete
  4. Interesting post. Looking at the technology industry, we have really seen its success rest on innovations in three distinct, yet related arenas; hardware (transistors), communications (optics), and software (compilers). These have never moved in lock-step and the laggard today, represents the best opportunity tomorrow.

    Today, the typical user has way extra computing power and is on the way to having their bandwidth requirements more than satisfied. When these conditions are satisfied, we should have enough kindling to ignite another wave of software/internet innovations (perhaps around a new UI metaphor?)

    www.cosmicvc.com

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  5. Yeah... everything important has already been invented. Big players will do everything from here on out. VC is toast. Where have I heard that before? http://bit.ly/JsUJ

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  6. i love that last paragraph and reblogged it at http://fredwilson.vc/. it is essentially what Brad and I decided to do when we started Union Square Ventures in 2003. we'd been in traditional VC firms (me since 1986) and sensed that the big tech plays were over and small capital efficient businesses were the future of VC. it's worked out pretty well for us so far but we won't know for sure until the fund is fully realized.

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  7. Kondratiev theorists always dust off this basic argument when times turn. The new wave (or "tool") cycle has run its course; it'll be 50 years (or whenever ) until the next one. Are you kidding me? New tools? Try genomic sequencing (which is largely an effort in computational analysis -- not wet-lab stuff). Or nanotechnology (see above), or, semantic analytics, or human factors, or financial engineering (I know, bad words just now; just wait a couple of years. You will be shocked.) Wondering about so-called Clean Energy? While I'm a skeptic, algae and other oil substitutes offer promise. Want to solve the energy conundrum? Figure out how to put 'well-heads' on a few "black smokers" under the sea. Tie that with distribution and problem solved. Paying attention to clean, potable water? You better be. What about space? Try quantum mechanics at zero-G, then talk to me about new tools.

    The simple fact is, we have never lived in more exciting, promising times. And we would realize it if we weren't so glued to the 'disasters of the day'. I am as guilty as the next; too many train wrecks vying for our attention; easy to become sanguine about our sorry state.

    Still, technology is - and has always been - about the application of new tools to old problems, whether solving Maslow's hierarchy of needs, or anything else.

    Think about it for a half hour, and you will come up with many more great opportunities. We're still a lot closer the primordial swamp than we are to Star Trek, no matter how much we wish it were not so.

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  8. Your stats show a sad exit history for VC backed companies during this decade but there are still 1000's of them out there. www.startuphire.com has 8000 companies in its database of VC backed companies.

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  9. I'm tempted to wonder if we haven't simply exhausted the cornucopia of Government funded R&D. The commercialization of Militasry invention is a good bit of the Silicon Valley story. DoD stopped spending on R&D and started buying off the shelf in the late 80s. Most of the 'advances' are simply expolitation of the Fed's investments.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The answer to the VC situation is simple...an over supply of technology. If nothing was ever invented or started again in High Tech, there is enough supply of "stuff" last for decades (i.e more than enough software around to get the job done for decades).

    Last, way to many silo-ed finance point solutions that are single products that would really be part of a larger companies product portfolio mix.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I am sitting in the middle of the VC industry and watching the crumbling of syndicates and havoc it is causing. It has been chaotic for so long that I am, in fact, glad that partial self-destruction is occurring. There is too much me too and I find too often VC employees are simply filling chairs rather than being driven by fear and trying to actually understand the physics of what their investments.

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