Two bits of news briefly caught my eye today.
Niklas Zennstrom investing $165m in disruptive b2c technologies. What grabbed me here was his urging of European entrepreneurs to think big. To quote an earlier technology guru (Henry Royce) ’without mass product and quality this country is finished’. Updating it for the software world would read something like ‘without global scale and a compelling product we can’t compete’. To a certain extent the answer is in Zennstrom’s own hands - will his fund give the entrepreneur enough funds to scale quickly or will they follow the classic (and unsuccessful) European model of investing enough to get to the next development stage?
The other item was Novell’s board rejecting Elliott’s offer. With $1bn in cash, and a lot of it not very accesible to US shareholders should you (a) look for innovative ways of returning it to shareholders or (b) go on a global acquisition spree? (c) a mixture of both.
For what it’s worth if Novell were to use its market position to enable smaller aquisitions to scale globally, there are a number of good companies around Europe that could fit any sensibly drawn up acquisition criteria.
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