Having a world beating technology is not sufficient to make a company a major player. Although Cambridge companies are often accused of selling their silver too early, growing a company beyond the initial core of its founders can be problematic.
I met ‘Elizabeth’ this week – my friend and first PR client – she had flown in from Australia ahead of the Ignite event, a boot camp for aspiring entrepreneurs at which she is a mentor. She has just launched her book on Amazon. Typical that Elizabeth would be first to embrace the Kindle publishing revolution and characteristic that the book is not a dry business bible.
I first met Elizabeth when working for Logica. She was responsible for keeping the computers and network running for a company that was operational 24 hours a day – a job she did effectively and with great humour.
Elizabeth’s work hard, play hard attitude to life took her on to set up a company that created the world’s first intranet for Sun Microsystems, the first live webcast for Paul McCartney, and probably the first interactional website for George Michael.
Then the ‘big idea’, her team started developing the first content management system that would allow the marketing department to update the content on the website without the need for technical support. A huge technical breakthrough and a massive market opportunity.
This company she ran from her house, or rather her family lived in the office. Developers don’t do office hours and working with the States means you need to be on call through the night. We had meetings in her living room surrounded by bits of kit and she supplied meals to whoever happened to be around at the time.
But her ambitions were beyond this and to get finance and grow the business she needed to bring in professionals in other disciplines – sales, finance, business development. But then she hit the ‘big problem’. The people she needed had come from a large corporate background. To take the risk of a start-up they needed luring with promises of share offers and big salaries that the company couldn’t afford.
Elizabeth successfully launched the company on the AIM stockmarket, an enormous achievement at the time. But just when it all seemed on course, the wheels started coming off. Suddenly she had employees and they need contracts and appraisals and enrichment opportunities and stakeholders that needed managing, this diverted her attention from her two core strengths of getting in the business and driving the product development.
I remember attending one meeting, feeling concerned that deadlines on a product launch had slipped again, to hear an administrator complaining that her printer didn’t have all the features she wanted and another talking about the colour scheme in the new office.
Attracting the right people, keeping the vision when the company grows beyond its core is a major stumbling block; especially for high tech companies where it is often mavericks that have the most disruptive ideas.
Most of the successful Cambridge tech companies either seem to be soft starts, where a paternal organisation takes care of the mundane issues until the business is self financing (ARM, CSR) or where there have been a pair of founders each with complementary skills who play to their strengths (BlueGnome, Visual Planet).
I think that the work that Elizabeth is doing now – mentoring early stage companies – would have greatly helped her younger self. A mentor is someone that provides a sounding board without an agenda.
One of the advantages of starting a technology business now, is that there is a generation of entrepreneurs available that have war wounds from the first dot.com bubble and are willing, like Elizabeth, to let others benefit from their mistakes.
A good number of them will be mentoring on the Ignite Programme organized by the Judge Business School Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning. Well worth checking out.
Elizabeth’s book is available on Amazon.
