CandidCapital

Library House's excellent Essential Web 07 conference provided an interesting insight into whether the Internet boom is back

In 2000 I spent 3 days at a garage.com bootcamp in Boston. Garage.com was then an advisory business with the strap-line "We start up start-ups" and its bootcamps were legendary as the place for savvy aspirant Internet entrepreneurs to garner all the tricks of the trade needed to get to that $1Bn IPO or trade sale.

In reality, as I remember it, while there was much concentration on the need to refine the elevator pitch (that 60 second sales spiel that you were meant to give to the hapless Sequioa Capital or Klenier Perkins partner when accidentally caught in the lift with them) and much of the advice was well-meaning, it was all la-la land. Essential business principles such as verifying that there was an addressable market with real customers ready to pay real money for real products or services got drowned out in the enthusiasm for "land-grab" or "selling the picks and shovels needed by the forty-niners" (i.e. the yet greater fools of the Internet bubble).

Yesterday I went to the Essential Web 07 conference organised at the BFI IMAX theatre by Library House. One way or another, 43 European web businesses already on Library House's radar, presented their business ideas to an audience of, mostly, venture capital and angel investors. The conference was excellent and I'm not just saying it because I'm a small shareholder in Library House. The entrepreneurs were the pick of the crop - and I should know having been an early stage technology VC in Cambridge for over twenty years. Without fail each had an good grasp of their product or service model and an obvious understanding of the web landscape in which they're operating. Their enthusiasm was effectively moderated by an impressive roll of panellists coming from Europe's leading media and venture capital businesses. This combination of high-energy and web-savvy entrepreneurs being questioned by well-informed and successful investors and general managers made for some excellent debate in the Q&A sessions of the conference - amongst the best I've ever heard.

Yet, as I caught pangloss's eye during one debate and realised that the same thougbt was crossing his mind, there is something of the atmosphere of 1999 about it all. First, there was a whiff of introversion - one entrepreneur, for example, described his business as "a cross between facebook and twitter with a dose of myspace and beebo thrown in..." or some such. Sure it sounds sexy and relevant, but where's the clarity of marketing focus that marks out how this business is different to, and presumably better than those names of the moment. Secondly, the discussion did get arcane from time to time - over the differences between one kind of instant messaging aggregation service and another, for instance. Thirdly, and this was most akin to '99, the spirit of the visionary was starting to stalk the landscape - complex and introverted business ideas where the utility to consumers is not obvious and which are sustained by the triumph of form over substance. I hope it doesn't all end in tears.

Still, more power to Library House's elbow - VenturePedia is the first information resource to have made a decent stab at a comprehensive inventory of Europe's high-growth, unquoted technology businesses and was the means to finding the conference's excellent line-up of web businesses.

28 June 2007 Technorati Profile

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