Two decades of nanotechnology opportunities

Visiting IBM’s Almaden Research Center Thursday, I was reminded that 20 years ago this week, an IBM ARC researcher made history by being the first person to move a single atom.

Don Eigler is perhaps better known for his November 1989 accomplishment: arranging 35 Xenon atoms to spell out “IBM.” Either way, these were major breakthroughs that enabled the subsequent growth of nanotechnology-related products and startups.

I must confess my limited knowledge of the technological and business aspects of nanotechnology. However, it was clear from my visit with ARC associate director Moidin Mohiuddin that IBM is continuing to invest in developing these technologies, part of decades of materials science basic research. Once this technology had direct application to IBM products (such as disk drive recording heads or coatings), today IBM will also out-license its technology as part of its seminal open innovation strategy.

As it turns out, two of my fellow Anteaters (UCI alumni) are not so ignorant. Jennifer Woolley and Renee Rottner published an article last year on nanotechnology startups in Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice — one of the top entrepreneurship journals.

Their article focused on the geographic distribution of nanotechnology startups. Their conclusion was that states that most aggressively supported nanotechnology research and commercialization had the most activity. (As a cynical ex-politics reporter, I might posit an alternate hypothesis — that the regions with the strongest nanotechnology base lobbied most effectively for state spending — but I haven’t seen their data).

For those trying to understand the phenomenon of nanotechnology-related entrepreneurship, this will be a seminal piece. Jennifer is continuing to do research in this area, so I recommend her work for those interested in the topic (despite her working for arch-rival Santa Clara).

Useful revenue model ambiguity

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch remarks on Twitter’s dilemma for starting its revenue model. To reword his points:

• Many firms are acquired pre-revenue and thus their valuation is made without proof of its revenue model.
• Before a startup has a revenue model, its revenues are anyone’s guess.
• Once a firm has revenues, the range of guesses will be much narrower — and often lower than the most optimistic predictions.

Of course, I’ve long been skeptical of Web 2.0 companies and their ability to create viable business models.

Cross-posted to Open IT Strategies.

A solution that found a problem

Several years ago, one of my students was involved in a business plan concept to use video board graphics processing units to provide extra processing power. The problem was this was a technology — or a solution — without a well-defined problem.

In this morning’s Merc, there was a story about TechniScan, a Salt Lake City company that is using GPU to enhance image processing of medical images (such as CAT scans). This is the targeted solution that my students lacked: a bounded technical problem (in terms of developing code and algorithms) with a well-defined group of customers with similar needs. If ever GPU processing is going to turn into a business, this would be it.

Ironically, the market they’re targeting is not a new one. Back in 1987, when my company was brand new, Peter Marx came down to Vista from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center to tell me how someday all medical imaging would be stored on computers. (At the time, the idea of images being stored on Sun workstations would have been considered technically challenging). He showed me all sorts of cool images that he’d processed on his Macintosh II.

Peter clearly had the right idea, but both the digital image generation and the host-based processing power were decades away.

So here we have examples of some of the factors that distinguish an incipient opportunity from a real one: a well-defined customer with a well-defined problem, and of course technical feasibility to do something about that problem.

The inevitable need for Plan B

Many if not most tech entrepreneurs eventually face a wrenching problem: when do I give up on Plan A and go to Plan B?

In some cases Plan A and B (or A,B,C,D …) co-exist alongside each other in a successful diversified revenue model. In other cases, the company is too small to have more than one plan or the initial plan is such a loser (or another such a winner) that the answer is obvious.

However, in many cases it’s hard for managers to admit the correct decision — either because the data is ambiguous or because of emotional involvement. I suspect that most founders will have a hard time letting go of Plan A, because of the psychic investment and legacy role. Or if Plan C comes from your new CEO — and it bombs — it’s often hard to decide to ditch the plan if it might also mean ditching the CEO.

On Wednesday, I stopped by Pinger, a mobile software startup located walking distance to my SJSU office. CTO Jocelyn Cloutier — who worked for Yahoo, AOL, Bell Labs and as a Montreal C.S. college professor — happens to be married to one of my friends and co-authors.

A venture funded startup that’s not quite 4 years, Pinger spent 2 ½ years trying to get its Pinger voicemail multicast system established. Despite a few high profile wins (like the 2008 presidential campaign of John Edwards), like so many other tech startups it found itself flogging a solution in search of a problem.

Cloutier said that at some point, the management team had to admit that the original company concept wasn’t working: “I just put two years of my life into there, so let’s try something different.”

So when the iPhone App Store launched in the summer of 2008, Pinger carefully evaluated it. On the one hand, ”we didn't know at that time that app store is going to be the thing.” In retrospect, the App Store proved to be a smash success — but as in any startup, it’s tough to make a decision when the future is unknown.

Still, Pinger saw iPhone apps as a big potential opportunity, based on the prior success of the iPhone and its increasing momentum. It jumped in with both feet: in little more than a year, Pinger released four iPhone aps:

• Dec 2008 Pinger Phone: an enhanced souped up IM client (ala Adium) with some other friend features. ad supported
• Feb 2009. Textfree: a freemium SMS client, naturally segmented by the # of messages per day
• July 2009: Doodle Buddy, a kid -oriented drawing program (that allows collaborative color sketching over a network)
• Today (Aug. 20). Free2Call, a new app (approved while I was there at Pinger) that tells consumers which calls are in-network.

While the first application is no longer being sold — the cost structure didn’t work — it paved the way for all the future apps. As Cloutier said: "Pinger phone showed us there's volume there. We can put an application out there and we are going to have a lot of downloads. Now the question is how can we have an application that they're going to use every day and are going to pay for?"

For Pinger, Plan A was a hosted service and Plan B was peddling iPhone apps at $0-$5 each. (Textfree Unlimited has an annual subscription).

It turns out the technology wasn't very similar between Plan A and Plan B, but the technologists were. The founders were veterans of Handspring — and thus understood the whole device-constrained software model — which enables the team to do a good job of designing something for a 320x480 screen with no keyboard and no mouse.

Pursuing Plan B, Pinger has made it so far, but there are lots of uncertainties and no guarantees. International growth is problematic: most of their products are tied to US-specific telecom industry features (Free2Call) which would require data or localization or negotiation for each country. The iPhone/iPT is only a small part of the US market; although ISVs would like to reach other handset owners, it's not clear which app store will catch on next.

More generally, there's also the inerhent problem of package software sales — as opposed to services like If you’re Google or Verizon Wireless, which make ongoing revenue off a customer after acquiring only once.

Software products — like vidoegames, records, movies — are prone to the one hit wonder problem. Once everyone buys your hit, what do you sell them next? If you don’t sell them another product — or an upgrade like Office 2023 or EA’s annual NFL Football update — then once everyone in your segment has bought the product, the income flow stops.

This one-time nature of software product sales nearly killed my own company, as initial strong sales fizzled out as we quickly reached the limits of unexpectedly small niches.

At Palomar we went from Plan A (consumer apps) to Plan B (developer apps) to Plan C (semi-custom OEM utilities) to Plan D (retail OEM utilities). We worked through the 4 business models in the first 4 years. At year 6 dumped all but Plan C (which was cash flow positive and the long run the only one that made any money).

What’s the take home? Entrepreneurs face several tough decisions, including when to look for Plan B (or C or …), when to implement Plan B, when to abandon Plan A. This choice is obscured by the various uncertainties: not knowing what customers will want, what competitors will do, where the industry will go and how effective our execution will be.

There is also the diversification vs. focus problem. Do you hedge your bets, or does spreading your bets guarantee that neither will succeed? Do you put all your eggs in one basket — all the weight behind the arrow? If so, how can you recognize that all-or-nothing bet has become controlled flight into terrain?

Famous lie slightly more true

As is well known in the US, there are three great lies:

1. "I'll respect you in the morning."
2. "The check is in the mail."
3. "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

In a man-bites-dog story, Entrepreneur magazine (which is a lot more pro-free enterprise than Inc.) is praising a government website for actually helping small business owners:

There's something new at business.gov, the official online business link to the U.S. government: community. OK, starting a blog site isn't that new an idea generally. But the business.gov blog, which just got going in July, offers a unique opportunity for small business owners to learn how to do business with the feds.
…
With all the new federal funding floating around from the stimulus bill, this seems like a great place to maybe get a quick answer if you're stymied on how to apply to get stimulus funds, apply for an SBA loan, or about anything else governmental. …

Not enough small businesses even look at trying to snag government contracts if you ask me. Hopefully, this blog will help demystify the process.

I don’t think anyone is going to change the list of lies, but every rule has its exception. It’s good to see sensible, low-cost efforts to disseminate information about existing government programs.

Innovation is more than invention

We thought we were home run hitters, but then we learned that we were born on third base. — Attributed to an AT&T alumnus

This quote by Stanford economist Tim Bresnhan (at Tuesday‘s State of the Net West conference) nicely captures the key problem facing innovative engineers working for any company smaller than the old Ma Bell.

Bell Telephone Laboratories had a better research staff (and working conditions) than all but a handful of universities. The monopoly profits of The Phone Company fueled some of the greatest inventions and scientific discoveries of the latter 20th century — things like lasers, satellites, information theory, etc. etc.

However, as this quote suggests, there are two reasons why such inventive output doesn’t provide a good measure of success:

• It’s easy to bring technology to market (e.g. electronic switching, microwave long distance) if your captive customers comprise 90+% of the largest economy in the world.
• When you can’t bring your expensive new technology to market, the guaranteed rate of return means there is no penalty for waste or inefficiency.

Invention is never enough. Except at Ma Bell, big innovations require (as Hank Chesbrough demonstrated in his Xerox studies) a business model and someone entrepreneurial enough to create a market if it doesn’t exist already.

Killing a business

Friday’s paper brought news of the planned liquidation of the Smith & Hawken, the premium garden store founded in 1979 in Marin County. Although I’ve never visited one of their stores, it was nonetheless sad news, because the company provided important inspiration for my early days as a tech entrepreneur.

When we founded our company in July 1987, my partner Neil Rhodes and I were intentionally (and ultimately unsuccessfully) emulating Hewlett & Packard. Like Bill & Dave, we started in a garage, and we deliberately emulated certain elements of the HP culture (which also became our biggest customer).

However, it was Smith & Hawken that provided explicit validation for some of our ideas about what a business was and could be. A year after we launched, in 1988 we read Paul Hawken’s Growing a Business; this was decades before the two comparable HP histories, The HP Way and Biil & Dave.

In his book, Hawken talked about issues that resonated closely with us, things like how to treat employees and the meaning of business. Although it’s been 20 years since I opened the book, I recall his view as being that creating and growing a business was more than just about money, and that founders could and should shape the firm to reflect what they believed important.

Although his industry was very different, this was a view quite consonant with tech startups of the 1980s, back when people tried to build a business for the long haul and before IBM and HP layoffs changed forever the idea that somehow tech companies were different.

Perhaps Smith and Hawken weren’t different, either. Hawken used the success of the book and the company to branch out into other things, leaving the company in 1992, which was then sold in 1993 for $15 million to the parent of NordicTrack. Some of the experiments by the founders (losses on an unsuccessful clothing line) were seen as contributing to the company’s need to be acquired

Since 1993, Smith & Hawken has had three corporate parents. The last owner was Scotts Miracle-Gro, which bought the company in 2004 and has been unable to find a buyer for the firm. Some of the turnaround moves sounded plausible, but nothing worked.

The two founders showed none of the remorse one might expect of a parent outliving its child:

"Scotts couldn't have been a worse corporate owner," said Hawken, who lives in Mill Valley. "Smith & Hawken had become just a ghost of itself."

[David] Smith, who lives in Mendocino County and owns Mulligan Books in Ukiah, said he had gone so far as to ask friends not to shop there.

"When Scotts bought it and Smith & Hawken was owned by the largest pesticide seller in the U.S., I suggested people boycott it," he said. "It had completely lost its roots."
…
Hawken, chairman and CEO of engineering company Pax Group, used the occasion of the closing to host a party Wednesday night. "I couldn't be happier to see my name come down," he said.

What’s the moral of the story? Perhaps that nothing lives forever. Certainly that (as my mentor Charlie Jackson advised me 15+ years ago) once you sell a company, you have to let go and accept what happens. Also, people change — even visionary founders — and their passions will also change.

Most of all, I think it says that even with a unique business concept and vision, firms need to have the management depth and the dispersed leadership and the culture to continue on after their founder is gone. This is certainly a crucial issue for Apple to deal with, more than a decade after Steve Jobs undid the terrible damage done by his three CEO predecessors, and nearly five years after his initial cancer surgery.