LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES
By listening to people and nurturing creativity Liberty Global Ventures is driving innovation and helping organisations shift into a new cultural mindset
“Every company , every industry , gets disrupted ”
BRUCE DINES PARTNER AND LEAD IN INNOVATION , LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES
A
bout three years or four years into Liberty Global ' s decision to focus on external innovation , it occurred to Bruce Dines , Partner and Lead in Innovation , that the disruptive technologies that had occurred in the last decade had removed friction , making it easier for entrepreneurs to launch and build businesses .
" There ' s more capital in the system , and there ' s less capital required to start companies now than there used to be . When I was an entrepreneur , there wasn ' t such a thing as on-demand computing . There wasn ' t such a thing as ubiquitous broadband internet access . There weren ' t programs specifically designed to help entrepreneurs accelerate their knowledge of how to start up and scale their businesses , and on the back end be introduced to interested investors ", says Dines .
" The venture capital industry was alive , but you had to go to New York or Boston , you had to go to Sand Hill Road [ Silicon Valley ], and you had to schedule meetings and sit down and talk to people about your vision and your plan . Now , there ' s on-demand computing and an internet distributed workforce . It ' s possible to hire talent from anywhere in the world and have them join your team . Capital requirements are 10 % of what they used to be : no IT person to run data servers , software , connectivity and telephony : all of that is now done in the cloud .” technologymagazine . com 93