About Intellectual Ventures
Some excerpts from an interview of Nathan Myhrvold (about his company Intellectual Ventures):
“What I decided to do was create the invention capital model. Making funding invention an investment. Imagine this. That there is an invention capital industry that raises billions of dollars a year to fund inventions, not startups. (…) we don’t create a company. We don’t ask for an idea. If you go to the venture capitalist, they expect you to come with an idea, a plan and a team. But if you go to them and say you don’t have an idea yet, they will say to come back when you have one
(…)
One of the things about my current business is that it will need to be ten years. We have a get rich slow scheme because it requires tremendous patience if you’re going to invest in really important research and invention. If you want to do really big stuff, you have to plan things that are some number of years away from reality. We plan for the closest something that is five years away from being a product. Some of that is pragmatic. Most of the engineers out there plan for the zero to three years range. That’s the nominal time. Obviously things slip and take longer than three years. Almost nobody works on stuff that is five years out. So if we work that way, it gives us a huge advantage. It lets us conceptualize things that are much more radical. The downside is that it may take you five years before anyone is interested.“
Why do I blog this? was trying to understand what Intellectual Ventures was doing after chatting about it with a friend. Intriguing company, curious model.
September 7th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
this approach of investment looks much more realistic than the one often proposed by VCs, who obviously don’t care about ideas/inventions creation but from their ROI perspective. here you feel that there’s more than investing into one company, and get your filthy money back whatever the price. most entrepreneurs feel being trapped into one big financial net right after getting their first seed money. then, in addition to all the daily burdens of getting things done, they suddenly have to run after another “tour de table”, and another one… investors’ injunctions to succeed by applying the whole management/market theory and tools often feel so much out of human perspective. inventions that lead to radical and “healthy” companies are based on natural development pace, not one-way push and squared business model. on the other hand, intellectual ventures are still market-based. could be interesting to ask inventors about their real experience with Intellectual Ventures. can investors really be philanthropist?