Cambridge Cluster

Image via Wikipedia

Farewell Louisa and thanks for being such a source of fun and inspiration to all and a great friend to my daughter.  With two hundred people at your service, I hope that we all brought some comfort to your family.  A wonderful service at Memorial Woodlands lead by a Methodist Priest who started by saying beautiful words that although the family wished a celebration of Louisa’s life, 32 years was too young and it would be a serious service.  Beautiful words from family and friends and comforting words from the Priest brought home the trajedy to all of us but within the all embracing belief in eternal life.

Up to Sedbergh School on the following day to give thanks to the very long life of one of Sedbergh’s finest headmaster, Michael Thornely (1918 – 2009).  A quite brilliant eulogy by Neil McKerrow and memories of a gifted Cambridge man.  Two of his children played Ashokan Farewell by Jay Ungar.

It all puts a business plan and all our efforts into perspective.  Now time for a week of walking on the drenched fells of the Lake District and time to reflect on my friend Charles.  It is not fair to work for forty years, retire and within weeks be fighting the dreaded C.

Image via Wikipedia

No need to wait for Lord Sugar and his Apprentice programme, go along to Mid Sussex auctions general sale every month held at the South of England Show Ground.  If you cannot make the viewing on the Friday, you need to be waiting outside the doors for the 8:45am opening.  The first part of the auction is furniture and the dealers are circling.  Last Saturday the first lot went for over £3,000 for a small table with samples of marble after a fierce competition between a phone bidder and a personal bidder.

Later in the day the auction moves on to clearance lots which are boxes or plastic bags with a wide range of similar articles such as shoes, jackets or crockery.  The furniture boys -seemingly all boys – go off in their vans and then the bidders are made up of a mix of men and women.  Fascinating to watch the different way people bids; some holding up their cards and others flashing up and down.  The lots are going for less than £100 so the auctioneer cannot hang around and, although very professional, is moving the lots along.  So yours truly missed out on a box of clothes in which there was an XXL leather jacket.  I thought that it was knocked down to me as I was holding up my number and I thought that the auctioneer was looking at me.  But he did not see my number and knocked it down to the person behind me.  I realised my loss when the winning number was read out.  I protested but was told very nicely to make myself known more forcefully.

But most of the punters are professional and buying to resell and know their markets.  The fifteen flat screeen TV stands, retail for nearly £200, were knocked down for £10 each to the owner of Dragoon Solutions so he had a good pay day and, most importantly, knows the product, the price to pay and the market.  He also goes all out to buy the laptops so if you outbid him, you are in unchartered territory.  Remember you are not allowed to power up the machines and most come without power supplies.

But I waited to the end and the owner of lot 913 kindly let me be the owner of the leather jacket and the rest of lot 913 were at nil cost to him.

Next day, the Show Ground hosts a car boot sale and so you can test your buying and selling skills over the weekend.  Just take a table and chairs, test out your entrepreneurial flair and make sure you have time to think through your business plan.  And thanks to the owner of lot 913 who made me very happy.

Reading the Cambridge Evening News of 27 October 2009, my eye was caught by the name BlueGnome ranked 20th in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 list.  BlueGnome?  I know that name.  Google brought up Cambridge BlueGnome “provides leading solutions for detection of copy number variation in the human genome“.  I was not much wiser and I could not find any details of the management or investors on the website.

Further down the Google page, I noticed a heading “Cambridge Enterprise – Success Stories“.  When I read the short case study, it all came back to me.  Nick Haan, the rather intense statistician, had made it to the big time.  And great that he has.  Through his wife’s business connections, Nick met Graham Sudden, who was then working for local telecommunications software company Commtag.  They investigated the market, rewrote and rewrote the business plan, and in 2003 received funding from the University of Cambridge’s Challenge Fund after being turned down by VCs and “negotiations fell apart” with angel investors.  In 2004 further funding was raised from NESTA and the Wellcome Trust.  Revenues for 2008 were expected to be around £3million and, to be included in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50,the business must be going very well.

So the question is how could the angels and the other investors miss such an opportunity?  If the founders had managed to convince the angels and/or VCs to invest, would they be even higher up the Fast 50 list?  Cambridge BlueGnome would make a very interesting case study and I wonder which business plan they use?  Do they have an option scheme?  Are the two founders equal shareholders?  So interesting to listen and to learn from them as it is such a good example of taking an academic idea and launching it to the market.  Could it have happened in any other cluster or were the skills and supported offered in the Cambridge Cluster crucial and not available elsewhere?

Let us hope that Nick and Graham can be persuaded to address a CUTEC meeting and help us understand where we as angels went wrong.

But great to have another success in the Cambridge Cluster.

And what will happen to Camstent? What can they learn from this case study?

A visit to DuoFertility, makers of a fertility monitor, by Lord Mervyn Davies, Minister for Trade, Investment and Small Business was followed by good media coverage and by an article on the Economist website.

If the article results in increased sales then it will justify the time and trouble taken to be on the radar of the likes of Lord Mervyn Davies.  Because once you are on the radar, then his department will do their utmost to make sure you are in the diary when he visits Cambridge.

Some founders of Cambridge Cluster companies keep a very low profile and concentrate on meeting the needs of the customers and then astound us all as we read about their success, usually when the company is sold.  Before starting up, Shamus Husheer, co-founder of DuoFertility, learnt from the events for  entrepreneurs at CU Entrepreneurs and other meetings in the Cambridge Cluster and is now putting something back by being an”old hand” at some of the meetings.

As an investor in DuoFertility, it is a pleasant buzz to read about our company and to see it featured by Jenny Chapman, the hard working business editor of the Cambridge Evening News and now to see national and international coverage.  But of course the real buzz will be reading about the sale of the company and checking the health of my bank account! At least I know that they use a business plan resource.