I’ve just returned to the UK from my old stamping ground, Boston, having witnessed yet another round in the New York/London FUD War which will see thousands of US tech companies doomed to remain trapped amongst the Living Dead.
Readers of aim4tech.com will recall the great Campos blooper of earlier this year.
That was the one in which SEC Commissioner Roel Campos carelessly likened AIM to a casino with the immortal words
"I'm concerned that 30% of issuers that list on AIM are gone in a year”
As with all such events, critics of this outrageous statement fell into two camps (weak pun entirely intended).
On the one hand were ranged the cock-upists.
They put Campos’ blunder down to an understandable slip of an ill-informed Commissioner. A view that was reinforced by his response to the Financial Times’ interviewer who questioned the provenance of Campos’ data, pointing out that the actual number of annual goners was around 3% - a global norm.
On the other hand sat the conspiracists.
Their read was of a deliberate attempt to mislead those weak and vulnerable CEOs and Directors of US VC-backed tech companies who dared even to contemplate escaping the threats of being a US public company by IPOing on London’s AIM exchange.
This latter group - the conspiracists - cited Campos’ defense as proof that his statement had been a cynical example of FUD-spreading. As I learned as a trainee salesman at IBM in the 1970s – casual disparagement is very effective but below the belt behaviour.
Spread a bit of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt and you can wreak havoc in the minds of a prospective customer.
Rhetorical questions were the favoured technique of the 70s –
“Our Nobel prize winning R&D labs published a paper recently pointing out that one of the biggest challenges facing tomorrow’s systems is the mean time between failure of critical system components like disk drives. I know that the maths for mtbf are pretty complex but I assume you’ve compared the regression analyses of our disk technology versus that of the other vendor on your short list.”
This sort of thing was a sure fire winner with the chance of being rumbled very slim.
In the unlikely event that the prospect:
a) agreed with our labs’ view;
b) had done the maths; and
c) had found that our disks were not the most reliable
all you had to do was say “Gosh, I’m surprised, totally amazed. This is a vital discovery that I need to communicate back to our Nobel prize winning boffins so that they can review their programs to ensure that our future products remain world-class. At least they’ll be able to understand your calculations - by the way, do the other vendors on your list have direct access back to their labs? Oh, and how many Nobel prizes have their scientists got?”
Now I admit that in the cold light of 2007, that all seems rather convoluted – but if you are a vintage IBM salesman or customer from the 70s it is guaranteed to instil waves of nostalgia!
Obviously it would have been so much easier to lie and quote some spurious statistic like “Our disks are 5 times more reliable than everybody else’s – only a fool builds a mission critical system with anything less than the most reliable core components.”
And if the Prospect caught us out lying all we had to do would either deny having ever said what he thought he’d heard us say, or reply “Oh I’m sorry – the numbers I was given must be wrong, let me go back and check and get you the correct figures.”
But for the IBM salesman of yore, we were unable to adopt either stratagem – for two reasons:
1. Lying is wrong before God and
2. Disparagement was a capital offense leading to summary dismissal
Fortunately for SEC Commissioners the standards aren’t as high and Mr Campos able to brush his entirely gross FUD attack by denying he had meant what he said - asked by the FT if he felt that Aim was a casino, he said:
“Absolutely not, I don’t believe it’s a casino and that was not the intention….What I was referring to was a generalised situation in which if [regulatory] standards are ignored and you have a spiral downward you could get into a situation where an exchange could be nothing more than a casino.”
Proof, the conspiracists claimed, that the Casino remark was deliberate misinformation designed to cause harm, confident in the knowledge that even if the truth is discovered most of the slur will stick because almost no one who read the first headline will ever the second.
Well, it’s not for me to judge whether it was a conspiracy or a cock-up.
I’m a Brit – and therefore brought up in a land whose manners dictate that it is unacceptably rude to impugn the motives of friends.
And we are friends – to quote the poster at BA’s Logan airport check-in desk – The UK and US Stand together.
But I am beginning to have my suspicions…..
It was a fine Fall day last Thursday and I was in Copley Square’s Au Bon Pain. At my table someone had left a copy of USA Today – I wonder whether anyone ever actually buys USA Today? – and as I idly flicked through it looking for some news (any news) I came across the Giuliani Prostate scandal.
Quoting an AP story the paper described the prospective Presidential candidate’s New Hampshire radio ad promoting his approach to healthcare reform. Using his illness to illustrate a message that the private insurance market will provide the best care he says:
"I had prostate cancer, five, six years ago,"
"My chance of surviving prostate cancer, and thank God I was cured of it, in the United States: 82 percent," he says. "My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England: only 44 percent under socialized medicine."
So here we have it – yet another reason to avoid our primitive cousin across the Atlantic.
We may stand together, but it’s better to keep our distance.
Not only are their capital markets little more than gambling houses (I thought that was what all capital markets were – but no matter!) the sheer unevolved state of the place is such that grown men are much more likely to die from malignant growths.
The message is clear - avoid the UK and all things British.
As you will already have guessed, Rudy’s claims were as specious as Campos’ – as overgrown as a terminal stage prostate.
So much so that it prompted the British Health Minister – Alan Johnson – to make a rare public intervention by a British politician in a US Presidential candidate campaign by pointing out in London’s Times newspaper:
“The British NHS should not become a political football in American presidential politics. Our rate of prostate cancer survival is actually much higher than has been claimed. The latest data shows a survival rate of over 70 per cent – and increasing.”
Undeterred by the facts – and probably confused by the interjection of a complex sporting analogy – a spokeswoman had previously insisted that Giuliani would continue to repeat the statistic and run the advertisement. The Times reported that she said the 44 per cent figure came from an article in a “highly respected intellectual journal” published by the right-wing Manhattan Institute, which he had read because “he is an intellectually engaged human being”.
And as Eugene Robinson points out in a Washington Post Op-Ed piece, those interested in the maths of the subject will find it is much more complex with the correct comparator being mortality – deaths per 100,000 of the male population.
Not surprisingly for two civilized countries on this measure the USA and UK are level pegging.
As of today and despite having its data so roundly criticised, the joinrudy2008 campaign site has remained totally silent on the subject. But then there’s no need to coment or issue a correction – the damage is done and the FUD is in circulation.
Now what does this have to do with the NOs – the Nasdaq Orphans?
Well firstly, CEOs contemplating their escape from the Living Dead can rest assured that their risk of death from prostate cancer is independent of which of the two main markets they choose for their IPO. And, to illustrate how facts can be presented to give the wrong impression – unlike most prostate-related issues the Atlantic equality is true for men and for women.
But more importantly, Rudy’s blooper is a wake-up call to the NOs’ CEOs to check all assertions about the world’s capital markets prior to deciding whether to list on AIM or to wait forever for a Nasdaq IPO.
I continue to recommend that all grown up companies seeking an IPO on a market designed for the operationally uncertain realities of relatively young companies visit the UK to check its relevance to their strategy.
Unfortunately I can’t issue the same enthusiastic invitation to Rudy.
If he is lucky enough to visit the UK in the near future (and with £1 changing hands for $2.05 he may find a lot to learn about economic management) he’d better only come if he’s in the rudest of health.
Or put another way – intellectually engaged human being or not (and I leave that judgment to others) he should spare no effort to stay out of the hands of our healthcare professionals who may find their treatment of folk who indiscriminately launch FUD missiles is less susceptible to the Hippocratic Oath and more to every citizen's solemn duty to fight the War on Error.
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