Features

net.wars: Nothing ventured, nothing lost

What does a venture capitalist do in a recession?

“Panic.” Hermann Hauser says, then laughs.

It is, in fact, hard to imagine him panicking if you’ve heard the stories he tells about his days as co-founder of Acorn Computers. He’s quickly on to his real, more measured, view.

“It’s just the bottom of the cycle, and people my age have been through this a number of times before. Though many people are panicking, I know that normally we come out the other end. If you just look at the deals I’m seeing at the moment, they’re better than any deals I’ve seen in my entire life.”

The really positive thing, he says, is that, “The speed and quality of innovation are speeding up and not slowing down. If you believe that quality of innovation is the key to a successful business, as I do, then this is a good era. We have got to go after the high end of innovation – advanced manufacturing and the knowledge-based economy. I think we are quite well placed to do that.” Fortunately, Amadeus had just raised a fund when the recession began, so it still has money to invest; life is, he admits, less fun for “the poor buggers who have to raise funds.”

World-beating

Among the companies he is excited about is Plastic Logic, which is due to release its first product next year. It will be a competitor to the Kindle that will have a much larger screen, be much lighter, and will also be a computing platform with 3g, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi all built in, all built on plastic transistors that will be green to produce, more responsive than silicon – and sealed against being dropped in the bath water. “We have the world beat,” he says. “It’s just the most fantastic thing.”

Probably if you ask any British geek above the age of 39, an Acorn BBC Micro figured prominently in their earliest experiences with computing. Hauser was and is not primarily a technical guy – although his idea of exhilarating vacation reading is Thermal Physics, by Charles Kittel and Herbert Kroemer - but picking the right guys to keep supplied with tea and financing is a rare skill, too.

“As I go around the country, people still congratulate me on the BBC Micro and tell me how wonderful it was. Some are now professors in computer science and what they complain about is that as people switched over to PCs – on the BBC Micro everybody knew how to program.

"The main interface was a programming interface, and it was so easy to program in BASIC everybody did it. Kids have no clue what programming is about – they just surf the Net. Nobody really understands any more what a computer does from the transistor up. It’s a dying breed of people who actually know that all this is built on CMOS gates and can build it up from there.”

Hauser went on to found an early effort in pen computing – “the technology wasn’t good enough” and “the basic premise that I believed in, that pen computing would be important because everybody knew how to wield a pen just wasn’t true” – and then the venture capital fund Amadeus, through which he helped fund, among others, leading Bluetooth chip supplier CSR.

Billion dollar companies

Britain, he says, is a much more hospitable environment now than it was when he was trying to make his Cambridge bank manager understand Acorn’s need for a £1 million overdraft. Although, he admits now, “I certainly wouldn’t have invested in myself.” And would have missed Acorn’s success.

“I think I’m the only European who’s done four billion-dollar companies,” he says. “Of course I’ve failed a lot. I assume that more of my initiatives that I’ve founded finally failed than finally succeeded.”

But times have changed since consultants studied Acorn’s books and told them to stop trading immediately because they didn’t understand how technology companies worked.

“All the building blocks you need to have to have a successful technology cluster are now finally in place,” he says. “We always that the technology, but we always lacked management, and we’ve grown our own entrepreneurs now in Britain.” He calls Stan Boland, CEO of 3g USB stock manufacturer Icera and Acorn’s last managing director a “rock star” and “one of the best CEOs I have come across in Europe or the US.” In addition, he says, “There is also a chance of attracting the top US talent, for the first time.” However, “The only thing I fear and that we have to be careful about is that the relative decline doesn’t turn into an absolute decline.”

Taper relief

One element of Britain’s changing climate with respect to technology investment that Hauser is particularly proud of is helping create tax credits and taper relief for capital gains through his work on Leon Mandelson’s advisory panel on new industry and new jobs. “The reason I have done it is that I don’t believe in the post-industrial society. We have to have all parts of industry in our country.”

Hauser’s latest excitement is stem cells; he’s become the fourth person in the world to have his entire genome mapped. “It’s the beginning of personal medicine.”

The one thing that really bemuses him is being given lifetime achievement awards. “I have lived in the future all my life, and I still do. It’s difficult to accept that I’ve already created a past. I haven’t done yet the things I want to do!”