I admire your columnist John Thornhill, in part, because he is a fellow entrepreneur, but a corrective is due (Opinion, February 10).
His basic premise that the government has hindered the opportunity for the UK to be a tech company powerhouse is off the mark.
The big point he misses, as does Kate Bingham (“Britain is losing its chance to be a life sciences superpower”, Opinion, January 24), is that there is a dearth of experienced entrepreneurial management in the UK.
The vast majority of managerial talent for biotech companies has not come from academia, big pharma or elite business schools but from successful companies started by entrepreneurs. The veterans of Genentech, Chiron and Cetus in the San Francisco Bay Area have started hundreds of companies. Likewise, in Boston with Genzyme, Biogen, etc.
Companies started by entrepreneurs are typically very focused, give employees broad exposure to the product development process and endow them with more individual authority and responsibility for the success of their product. What Britain needs are big successes, companies like Intel, Google and Genentech, that then become the finishing schools for an army of talent. Government has very little role in making that happen.
There is a rub: unlike 40 years ago, today’s venture capitalists are not investing to create big successful independent companies. VCs are now transactional.
Examine the “deal sheets” of VCs: they list how many of their investments become acquisitions by Google or GSK or other large companies. The investment thesis is to be acquired. At least in biotech, there are reasons for this: drug development is painfully slow, capital intensive, operates in a heavily regulated environment for reasons of safety, and often ends in failure.
But if successful independent companies are the source of effective managerial talent, under current investment strategies, that pool will be even smaller.
No biotech company failed because of insufficient research and development tax credits. They fail because they are trying to do something very hard: defy the disease process. They occasionally succeed because management has learned how to deal with the inevitable setbacks and problems that are part of every drug development programme. That you learn the hard way, through (serial) experience.
Hugh Young Rienhoff Jr
Chief Executive, Imago BioSciences
San Carlos, CA, US
