VENTURE CAPITAL FOR TECHIES    

Dilshan Kathriarachchi makes a case for hi-tech entrepreneurs to
be given an opportunity to ascend through venture-capital funding

The technology landscape is a turbulent one of constant change and disruption. Fortunes are made and lost overnight, and you are only as good as your next creation. Only a very few select veterans have had what it takes to ride the waves of this dynamic industry and come out on top. Reading the world’s top 100 rich list, one knows that the market has rewarded these individuals handsomely for their achievements.

We wrap up another year, the 11^th of the much-anticipated 21^st century, with the greatest champion among technology and business veterans missing from ever-thinning ranks. The traditional media outlets jumped on the story of his death by covering the life and legend of Steve Jobs from various polarised angles – only to move on to the next big story a few days later. Personally, such a farewell was far too ‘plastic’ to be worthy of the man behind the story.

He was someone who would transform the everyday lives of at least one more generation and has most certainly touched the lives of this readership (or will do so in the near future). If you are the person to put weight behind the various top 100 lists of publications, then Steve Jobs would be one of the most influential men of the 21^st century, even posthumously.

Within a US economy suffering on the brink of a double-dip recession where manufacturing had eroded outside its borders, Steve Jobs and Apple built a global manufacturing-intensive business that grew a company to become the world’s most valued enterprise. While the Jobs formula gives hope to large swaths of the US economy under siege from emerging powers, there are many lessons for countries such as Sri Lanka that cannot depend on manufacturing might alone for economic development.

Jobs and Apple had created a perfect combination of state-of-the-art manufacturing technologies, Third World delivery rates and software that linked all the pieces together from the booming US knowledge economy. At the end, the result was a product that did not solely depend on international intellectual property laws to be protected from theft, which could not be easily cloned in a factory in China and fundamentally changed how knowledge-based commodities are sold.

Sri Lanka’s future firmly lies in its ability to develop for itself a strong knowledge-based economy, as our own manufacturing capacity is rapidly eroding on the global stage. As such, Sri Lanka’s competitive sights need not be on Bengaluru, Hyderabad or Shanghai, but Silicon Valley and Dublin where true innovation takes place. Taking into account the island’s global economic footprint and the size of our skilled knowledge workers, it seems counterproductive to follow the Indian model of becoming the world’s de facto one-stop-shop for BPO services sold by the hour.

What Sri Lanka actually needs is a new generation of entrepreneurs who can spark true innovation. Those who can build value into our infant knowledge economy, while at the same time leveraging our existing manufacturing industries and expertise. While we celebrate Steve Jobs and his cultural and economic contributions to humanity, we must also assess the environment and opportunities we need to create that will help untapped talent to blossom into a similar stature in Sri Lanka.

Everyone has his own opinion, but personally to me, Steve Jobs represents a risk taker that just happened to get it right the first few times only to obtain funding – and even encouragement at the right time to make risk taking and pushing the envelope a successful and illustrious career. So to have our own crop of Steve Jobs,’ we need risk takers who will drive our knowledge economy to new, ground-breaking and increasingly risky waters every single day. Risky waters where we truly become competitive with the pioneers in Silicon Valley and capture the mindshare of the world.

More importantly, we need a batch of investors – angels are good, but established venture-capital funds are better – to fund such innovative entrepreneurs. I can count Sri Lanka’s venture- capital funds with the fingers in both my hands, and less than half of them will have operating funds with the inclination to go out there and take an extremely risky bet – the types of investments venture-capital funds are meant to take. The ones that involve a scribbled idea on the back of a paper napkin, raw passion and a little more than trust between a seasoned investor and an immature kid who has yet to prove himself.

Sri Lanka is still miles away from having its own collection of such entrepreneurs, but some are already getting organised and starting to make a few waves. I hope the funding opportunities would soon catch up with this trend, at least before the flames of innovation fizzle out for no other reason than a lack of trust and faith from the investor community. We urgently need risk takers to get us into the knowledge-based economic model – actually, we needed them yesterday. In Steve Jobs’ own memorable words: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

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