We’ll all be selling tickets to Theme Park Europe if we don’t start building the new companies of the future, Lawrence Johns of Amadeus Capital Partners told the Silicon South-West Viva Entrepreneurs meeting in Bath this morning.
"We need a lot more geniuses," said Johns, "VCs are getting grief because we’re getting crap returns in Europe and it’s your fault – you entrepreneurs can’t create enough value. So people are retrenching, they’re putting their money into gold – or Greece."
"We need to re-invent how this works," added Johns, "when we created CSR it went from four people to $3bn in eight years."
However things have changed. "At the moment most of the VCs in the world will not invest in silicon companies," said Johns, "the silicon industry has all the clever people but less clever people write things like Skype, Twitter, Autonomy and LinkedIn and create billions of dollars of value.
Johns concluded: "Hardware is going soft. My investment intentions are going soft."
He had some ideas where the billion dollar businesses of the future could be built.
One is managing privacy. "Enormous amounts of data are being gathered on everyone and are being sold to the advertising industry so it can target individuals," said Johns, "but I’ve only see one company pitch to me on this. It’s a vast opportunity."
Another is using the web to search for ideas. "Putting business plans on the net and getting other people to evaluate it is an obvious thing," said Johns.
He also though augmented reality has a lot of potential. "You could point a camera at a house and tell it to send a message to the owner offering a price for it," said Johns, "or point it at a school and find out what the waiting list is. It’s an enormous opportunity."
Johns reckoned the high-tech community is underutilising a significant UK asset. "Half the world’s advertising agencies and half the world’s digital agencies are in the UK. The other half is in New York. We need to collaborate with them."
