Sean Mulvany

Each quarter, the Irish Venture Capital Association release an overview of the investments made in companies here. Many (about 40-60%) of deals are undisclosed. However, those that are can reveal useful trends in who is investing how much in what. This quarter, it’s MedTech and Saas plays by number and amount in the lead. Mainstay Medical closed an €89M round and there were two >€20M in Brightflag (Saas) and Tines (Cybersecurity).

I’ve spent the last few years playing with various frameworks like React and Angular (even Java and NetBeans) and using a lot of Bootstrap to roll my own websites to do various things. I think it’s time – after a loooong break to maybe go old school and jot down the odd thought here. It’s nice to have someone else take care of all the inter web magic of hosting, backups and design for a change. I’ll likely still try things – as in beat some libraries together with poor pipework – but as side projects. This should be the main place I go to in future.

I was at the HealthBox Open Day in London last Thursday where 7 mHealth companies pitched for investment to an invited audience. The companies had participated in the HealthBox 3 month accelerator programme developing aspects of their business as diverse as building financial projections and designing user interfaces. Many had managed to close a first deal, like Health Clinic Plus, or engage in a first pilot, like Mira Rehab. The point of engagement with the audience of prospective partners and funders was through a ten minute pitch that had been honed over the previous months. Two contrasting things struck me. One was the uniformly high standard of clarity and succinctness of the communication. The second thing was the uniformity, itself. The pitches tended to be two handers with a use case involving a “meet Joe Bloggs and see his day with/without our technology/service”. It left me a little conflicted. On the one hand, speaking from personal experience, I’d give my eye teeth to hone a pitch to the quality level I saw in London. On the other, it’s hard to raise money at the best of times and standing out from the competition for scarce cash is vital.

Some interesting articles in this week’s Economist on innovation at http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21569381-idea-innovation-and-new-technology-have-stopped-driving-growth-getting-increasing and http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21569393-fears-innovation-slowing-are-exaggerated-governments-need-help-it-along-great. In short, the view is that the era of transformational change (steam, jets, telephones, etc) is behind us. We’re doomed to incremental innovation that will result in perpetually slow economic and productivity growth.

I don’t agree. I think that many of this era’s breakthroughs like computing and robotics will take time to bed down as measured in 10s of years just like the major technologies of the past. If economic growth is slowling in the developing world, I think automation and the ability to replace people with machines is a  growing contributor – see “Race Against The Machine” by Byrnjolfsson and McAfee, for example. There’s also the ongoing impact of several years of recession.

The narrative that things like sanitation, especially the toilet (see current cover of the Economist) just arrived and improved human health over night is simplistic. The precursor, the privy, was around for a very long time. Like steam (the Greeks and Romans had simple, toy steam engines), it took a long period of tinkering before it became a useful and widely used appliance. The humble U-bend being the key breakthrough in the case of the toilet. As such, it’s too early to tell if this is a fallow period in innovation. Proxy measures like changes in economic growth or productivty rates likely have a complex mix of causes.