IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-22726-2_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Pomp and Circumstance

In: Venture Capital and the European Biotechnology Industry

Author

Listed:
  • William Bains

Abstract

Having given the company too little money, fired the management, blocked business deals and driven the business into a commercial cul-de-sac, one might have thought that the VC/manager would at least want to conserve every penny of cash that the company had. However, the business model as it is pursued by VC-backed biotechnology companies in Europe does not appear to do this either. What I called ‘Cargo Cult Economics’ in Chapter 1 appears to apply here too — the argument that if big, successful companies do something, then if we do it too we will be a big and successful company. I will exemplify this with three examples of needless expenditure that VC-backed firms pursue in the pursuit of the illusion of being a ‘big, successful company’. I should emphasise that generally these policies are pursued by companies that are not big, successful companies, and in some cases are not big or successful because they have run out of cash.

Suggested Citation

  • William Bains, 2009. "Pomp and Circumstance," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Venture Capital and the European Biotechnology Industry, chapter 10, pages 140-149, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-22726-2_10
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230227262_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-22726-2_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.