Saxaphone
I chat with this friendly musician crossing the Thames on the Waterloo Bridge. He is thrilled to know David and Josh play the tenure saxaphone and cracks into a wide smile when we find something of mutual interest.
The Tube on strike so I find myself walking (and grumbling) from Green Park to Buckingham Palace then Parliament and Big Ben and finally alongside the river next to the Southbank Center, Tate Modern and the Millennium ridge which I cross towards St Paul's to arrive at a restaurant on High Timber Street. I take London for granted most of the time but, as the sunsets, despite the striking Underground, I appreciate this remarkable place.
David, an attorney whom I have known since the go-go years, organises a dinner party for those of us interested in company-building and technology. It is an interesting group, too, which includes Richard, the founder of Razorfish; Mark, who is an operating partner at Silver Lake which owns $14 billion of later stage tech growth equity; Rod, who sold his IT business to WPP last year; Andres, from Argentina and now a tech banker at Jeffries; and Hugo, Head of Policy & Commercial, BBC Future Media & Technology. It is a smart and engaging group in a way only the clever British can be. We discuss the usual reasons for why Europe lags the US re successful start-ups (fragmented market), venture capital (no NASDAQ) and entrepreneurs (culture, mentality; unclear road to riches). Europe, we agree, is capable of creating Hi Tech but unable to exploit it. Examples are Acorn Computers (losers to IBM and Apple); Autonomy (indexed search, loser to Google); Tim Bernards-Lee (HTML and the Internet, losers to, well, everybody). Yet there are success like Skype and Betfair, which my friend Josh founded in London since online gambling prohibited in the states - it will go public on the London Stock Exchange this month at a £2.5 billion valuation. Despite these exceptions only US seems capable, or wacky enough, to make the big bets pan out: Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, about every application on the iPad .. these companies are inspired. Europe would be a much better place if we could do the half of it.
