The history of venture capital establishes four statistical regularities: (1) The skew in VC returns is huge; (2) the returns generated by specific VC firms is persistent; (3) VC returns track the public equity markets; (4) VCs have been successful only in a limited set of sectors: IT and Biotech.
The innovation economy is a world where progress is made by trial and error and depends on access to funding not concerned with immediately visible economic value. Two sources have played decisive roles historically: mission-driven governments and financial speculation generating occasional “productive bubbles”. As our current Digital Revolution matures, both these sources are urgently needed to address the next, needed technological revolution: to develop and deploy effective responses to climate change.
The United States Studies Centre’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program hosted a lunchtime presentation from longtime venture capital investor Dr Bill Janeway, followed by an opportunity to ask questions and network.
William H. Janeway is a Special Limited Partner of American private equity and venture capital firm Warburg Pincus where he was responsible for building the information technology investment practice, which has invested over $15 billion in more than 270 companies over the last 25 years.
He is the author of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators, and the State, about which Eric Schmidt, Technical Advisor and Former Executive Chairman, Google and Alphabet Inc. has said: "Since its original publication, Bill Janeway’s Doing Capitalism has become a classic, helping to launch the digital revolution and explaining how venture capital has leveraged state investments and financial bubbles to change the world through technological innovation. In this new edition, he looks at the past to predict the future, explaining how the digital revolution has grown and taken on a life of its own - and letting us know, with clarity and insight, what comes next."
