ePlanet ventures widely recognised in global VC circles. 7 global offices.

Investment professionals are either deeply technical or have formed their own companies.

We want all the things other VCs want.

Allocation is purely opportunistic, do not pre-allocate funds to specific segments.

We benchmark companies against their global competitors.

Invested in Skype and Baidu (Chinese search engine).

No. 1 performing fund in the world.

Our companies need to be category dominant.

Three key enabling technologies, biotechnology, nanotechnology and ICT.

We can visualise the detail of biological function (e.g. the flagella of a Sperm) , we can simulate the process and then we can conceive of designing an artificial version.

By 2025 (if Moore’s law continues) the available computational power will be equivalent to a human brain (hmmm!).

We can now produce wiring diagrams for brain function.

We can connect a brain to a computer (nasty picture of a mouse with what looks like an Ethernet cable stuck into its head!).

Ritalin routinely used by university students to enhance performance in exams.

The Brain Age is Ninetendo’s biggest selling product (target market the over 50’s).

Sustained health. Artificial pancreas.

Extended life span. Suppress the seven chemical path ways. Reduce your calorie intake to extend your lifespan. Doubled the life span of a mouse by reducing its calorie processing capability.

The first person to live to the age of a 1000 may have already been born (Aubrey De Gray).

Mastering complexity . Global warming. Climate change.  What ever we do is a waste of time, its what happens in China and India that will make the difference. Climate engineering is the future. Alternatively we can go nuclear. Their is now world shortage of Uranium Oxide. (25% price increate in the last year).

The hydrogen economy, burn hydrogen, you get water not C02.

Nano, Bio and Info is the future.

Intrapace – emplanted in stomach and makes you feel full. Can make you sick if you overdo it. Stomach pacing.

Creativity. Moore’s law, plastronics, Any-Fab.  D:Wave – quantum computing chips (just demo’d a 16 bit computing chip).

Sustainability – Batteries, HPL- High powered Lithium.

JungJo (sp?) University in China- 200,000 students, 70% doing science, 125 startups produced last year, founded only 5 years ago. Welcome to the competition.

Entrepreneurs – Core Team, innovative product x 10, pragmatic market entry strategy and large addressable market.

Drivers – Wellbeing, creativity and sustainability.

Without Nuclear power we are hugely exposed strategically. (Big push for nuclear).

 

Questions:

From Cookstown. Nobody ever goes to Cookstown, they are sent to Cookstown.

4 P’s, people, presentation, product, professionalism, (5 p, that I’ll take, profit!).

His mother’s comment after school: He won’t lead or drive!

Started as a pharmacist. Payment of 5 shillings a month.

Worked for Glaxo for 13 years as a salesman.

No early specialisation, he got a broad thrust of what the pharmaceutical industry was about.

Then founded Gaylen. (Gaylen, the first physician).

Started Allmac in the last few years.

One man band for a year.

Packed and sold my own pharmaceutical products.

Did my own cashflow (cash business).

In those days there were good profit margins in pharmacy (not anymore!).

I’d like to write a book on “How not to start a business”. South East England would have been the perfect spot for a pharam business.

Never had any trouble myself (with the troubles).

Started trading in the Republic in the 80’s.

Not much government support.

Started with LEDU. Applied and was turned down. Dupont got 24m for 100 employees. Approached minister for commerce and said “If I came over here with my bottom painted black and an English accent you’d be throwing money at me”.

Manufacturing is drifting away. Knowledge based industry and R&D is the future. Manufacturing is all about “how cheap can we make it”.

We do the R&D here and outsource the manufacturing.

We want a quick answer to our requests for funding and state help. Can’t afford to wait around for three months.

Highly competitive market, every state in the US funding biotech.

Gaylen – the 4 P’s got right. Gaylen never had R&D like Allmac.

Gaylen was a pharma company, Allmac is a service company.

Persistence – Far too many people give up when they are next door to success.

Gaylen lost 60% of its turn over in ’84 when the blacklist came out.

You never know when you are close to success, their is always a dawn.

Why did you float Gaylen? Need expansion money, needed to make a US acquisition (eventually purchased Warner Chillcott). Dovetailed Warner-Chillcott marketing strengths with Gaylen manufacturing expertise.

Its not about money (its a driver), its about making a contribution in the field of science and humanity. Its a creative job.

Every company has its own thumbprint. People are not driven by money. Give people a job that interests them and that will motivate them. People work because they want to work.

Developed first class scientists in Craigavon, but the American market made that business cold. Allmac now have a team whose relationship amongst themselves is priceless.

Retired from Gaylen at 69.

29 nationalities in the factory in the Allmac factory in Portadown, mainly scientists.

Allmac has its own engineering department.

We think every other nation is better than us. (the Irish problem).

We are naturally good communicators.

Americans will rarely take you out after business is complete. (and go and talk to some Germans, their’s an experience for you!)

What do you think of VCs? They are like salt and sugar in your diet. You need some, but too much will kill you.

The eye is trained on the VC once they are on board. Science doesn’t work that way. VC would kill some of the Allmac projects.

This years Private Equity conference is hosted at the Four Seasons so we have WIFI access (and its free! shock horror!). The big emphasis this year is on biotech with all the speakers so far from the Pharma and BioTech sectors. Full notes will follow.

Listen to Thomas Howe interviewing Sean O’Sullivan about mysay.com. MySay.com is a social telephony Web 2.0 application, think of it as twitter for voice.

I want an option in Google that allows me to say  “never bring me to this site again”. The ideal purpose is to avoid those pay for sites which hook on a useful looking domain name and then fill the site with spurious adverts. If I can eliminate those sites from my search them I can give other sites a chance to make it into my search. And lets be clear about this, this is not a per search elimination, I never want to see these sites ever again.

Think of it as an inverted Customised Search Engine.

I got the attached letter today. If you can believe it, Enterprise Ireland, the government agency charged with fostering, encouraging the support of small businesses now wants payment in advance for its services.

Why? Why? What possible reason could their be for this other than some idiot bean counter ruling the roost.

Everybody I meet in EI is consistently helpful and well meaning, buts the organisation seems to an excellent example of lions led by donkeys.

Who makes these decisions? What is the justification?

Sharpcast answers the top ten questions about their new product.  A bit marketroidy but good questions all the same.

Silicon Republic reports that Trinity College is to adopt Gmail for Domains (premier or standard ? nobody says in the article) as the default email account for all students. That’s a pretty big Gmail for Apps deployment, I would guess they will need the premier edition to allow integration with their student registration process.

Trinity plans to give every member of the Student body a tcd.ie email account for life, which is pretty cool. I also note nosing around the Google Apps for Domains website that under sales they have a Education version advertised.

Is that the sound of a thousand Outlook Express accounts closing I hear….

Spent some time playing with Yahoo Pipes this morning. Very nice and slick interface for web savvy programmers, but not much to see here for mere mortals. Its fairly good at aggregating and manipulating feeds, buts its still pretty much a walled garden. I may be missing something but how do you get out of Pipes? I see tracks going in but none coming.

Can I send content to an ftp site, or a blog or a virtual file store (S3 anyone?).

I can appreciate Yahoo might have some concerns about shipping some large percentage of the Internet through their servers, but somebody is going to do an input/output system that will not just aggregate for display but aggregate for subsequent processing.

How would I extend pipes? Let people at the meta.  I want to create my out sources and my own sinks. Imagine being able to incorporate a Rails or Django endpoint as a sink to process the content and then be able to feed that content back into Pipes? Why can’t I add XML-RPC or REST requests as a source?

 Now that would be something.

(Cross posted from http://putplace.com/blog)

Watching “Kill it, Cook it, Eat it.” on BBC 3. They have just killed and cooked a pig. I now fully understand the phrase “bleeding like a stuck pig”.

Nobody in any movie I ever saw bled like that pig.

However after watching the loin being cooked I quite fancy a pork chop!