With a career rotted in venture capital and technology, David C. Blivin has experience in the fundamentals of funding—including encountering start-ups with innovative ideas that had to be turned down when they didn’t meet the requirements for investment. With years of experience building funding ecosystems in the southeast (RTP, NC), southwest (New Mexico in particular) and northwest Europe, Blivin’s CROSSING THE CACTUS: A Blueprint for Tech Commercialization Success Outside Silicon Valley demystifies the process of turning a great idea into a successful business.
CROSSING THE CACTUS has a practical goal: teaching venture capital how to nourish tech innovation outside of tech centers like San Francisco or Boston. The style lends itself effectively to that goal, breaking the structure down into step-by-step processes that are illustrated by both successes and failures in states like New Mexico and Colorado. The operative word here is “ecosystem.” CROSSING THE CACTUS avoids the self-congratulatory, silver-bullet style of some guides to success. The text is quite clear that success depends on the healthy interaction of mutually supporting structures, often built up deliberately over time. Too often, labs or fledgling companies look to angel investors (or venture capital firms look directly to labs or universities) without understanding how this ecosystem functions (and, therefore, often overlooking the need for experienced managers who can guide the transition from idea to business).
In fact, this gives CROSSING THE CACTUS tremendous insight into the business of innovation as a whole, regardless of industry. Experience shows time and again that the “free market” does not favor innovation. On the contrary, it leads to the concentration of wealth, infrastructure, and power in places like San Francisco or Boston— creating precisely the problem this book is trying to solve. A healthy ecosystem is dense and layered, and, at nearly every step, it involves favorable government intervention: publicly funded universities and laboratories; federal research grants; state tax breaks for business investment; even city ordinances and urban planning that make an area more desirable for employees to move and live there. Although it isn’t the focus of the work per se, it’s an inescapable truth: thoughtful policy-making and robust government support are and always have been essential to fostering innovation in the United States.
The book is not for everyone. Some potential readers will likely be disappointed that most of this advice is for investors, rather than for innovators themselves. However, everyone in the innovation funding ecosystem benefits from such a clear and pragmatic understanding of how that ecosystem works.
Thoughtful and clear-eyed, David C. Blivin’s CROSSING THE CACTUS: A Blueprint for Tech Commercialization Success Outside Silicon Valley is a useful primer for anyone seeking to understanding how innovation is accomplished in America.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader