Chameleon PR

As part of our involvement with the “Entrepreneurial Leadership Speaker Series” at the London Business School, Richard and I attended last night’s event to see Stan Boland, CEO and founder, Icera, give an insight into his career and views on entrepreneurialism.

Prior to Icera, which is already proving a great success in the mobile broadband chip sector, he was president and CEO at Element 14, an ADSL chip company, which Broadcom acquired for $640m. He was also CEO of Acorn Group plc, and a director of ARM Holdings plc.

Talking through his experiences, Stan was sprinkling golden nuggets of insight like confetti. The one the struck me most was that Europe is on the brink of enjoying the emergence of a new wave of home grown technology powerhouses.

The first wave of Europe’s technology companies were largely small and grew to medium size before being sold. With a generation of entrepreneurs now into the second venture (just like Stan), the companies being founded are medium sized at birth and will grow big.

Stan also hit on the importance of venture capital and good people. Besides providing investment, good VCs should aggressively challenge the business model but without taking the decision making out the entrepreneur’s hands. Equally, the best VCs will provide countless valuable contacts for business opportunities, stress-testing the business model and support. But his biggest piece of advice was finding, hiring and keeping the very best people available, and to benefit from ‘the magic’ of having great people highly motivated by working for a company they part own.

After the event, we went for dinner with the guys behind the speaker series, Stan and Ludwig Siegele from The Economist. Despite having been in the UK for a year now, Ludwig had his first ever pie. I felt a deep sense of British culinary pride as he tucked into it.

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