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October 07, 2007
Puzzler Winners - VC History Buffs
The latest puzzler question
Name the entrepreneur and investor who is considered the "father of venture capital".
generated quite a pileup in our inbox. We tried to answer them all but if we missed one, thanks for writing in and making us realize that we have a lot of interesting readers at the alarm:clock euro.
As we said, the first and the seventh to write in with the correct answer would win. The name we were looking for was Georges Doriot , the French-born Harvard professor and US Army officer, who earned the 'father of' title because of his investment fund called ARD. (More details inPBS' Who Made America )
Its goal was to "transform technological research into profitable enterprise", without government support. Its best-known deal was DEC, where ARD invested $70K in 1957 and sold the stake in 1972 for $350M (source is a ppt file.)
The first in our inbox was Kerry Ritz (image left) who is the London-based managing director at the US-headquartered broadband telephony company Vonage.
Kerry launched Vonage in the UK in 2005, after being part of the team that launched 3, the Hutchison Whampoa owned third-generation mobilephone operator.
Ritz said that the clue of the French/US connection was the giveaway.
The seventh reader to write in with the correct answer was Stephane Valorge, co-founder and partner at Clipperton Finance, a Paris-based investment banking boutique with a strength in high-tech and media. He's modest and didn't mention in his email that his company has raised about €70M in venture capital for tech companies in France this past year or so. We are linking to Valorge's LinkedIn profile to cover up for his modesty.
Your a:c euro reporter was not aware of Doriot and that he was considered the father of VC when regular reader Alain Revah suggested the quesiton. (We won't forget it now). In the meantime, we learned that Doriot was an influence on Arthur Rock (see the last paragraph here), who is also known as the father of VC in the US, and whose name several of you gave as the answer.
Another nugget about Doriot is that he contributed to startup up of Insead, the b-school in France, which is how several other readers, all Insead alumni, had the ability to answer the question without using a search engine.
Posted on October 7, 2007 04:43 AM | Posted to quiz | Permalink
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