Philippa Kaur

INDIAN NUPTIALS can be garish affairs. The groom often rides to the venue on a horse, or a Royal Enfield motorcycle. Portable DJ sets, fired up by car batteries, blare out Bollywood hits. Traffic on busy streets is routinely blocked to accommodate wedding processions. Matrimony in India is also big business. KPMG, a consultancy, estimates the wedding industry’s revenues at roughly $50bn. Before the pandemic these were growing by 25% a year.As elsewhere, covid-19 has forced many Indian couples to postpone tying the knot. It may also have changed the way they go about it. With big weddings on hold because of their superspreader potential, many informal caterers, coconut-water sellers, ice-cream shops, wedding-card printers and flower vendors are struggling as weddings are put off. Online services, by contrast, are thriving. Matrimony.com, one of the biggest, has reported a rise in revenues of at least 20%, year on year, in each of its past four quarters. Shaadi.com, among the oldest such sites in India, has seen a jump in subscribers. And wedding platforms that help families to organise and even conduct weddings online are popping up.Digitisation even extends to courtship. Prospective brides and grooms can no longer introduce themselves in person, sometimes perform on stage, and sit for interviews with their pick’s parents across a desk, speed-dating style. But in India, where arranged marriages remain common, parents and matchmakers still have to be involved. And so now does Zoom.Murugavel Janakiraman, boss of Matrimony.com, expects its new video-calling feature for introductions to persist—not least because it deals with the common grouse from customers that their chosen one’s profile picture embellishes reality. During nationwide lockdowns last year video calls also allowed couples to continue their wooing virtually. Jeevansathi.com, another big matchmaker, saw its number of video meetings rise more than 11-fold. Call duration rose by a factor of ten.Pre-wedding functions are also increasingly online. Couples seek the blessing of elders by touching the laptop screen in lieu of their feet, says Kanika Subbiah, founder of WeddingWishList.com, a wedding platform. WedMeGood, an app, hosts vendors like makeup artists, photographers, caterers and priests (along with their vaccination status).Some cautious families have arranged visits by health-care workers to guests’ homes to have them tested before they attend a wedding in person. Alternatively, you can celebrate remotely. WeddingWishList has hosted more than 100 weddings in its virtual rooms. And the business opportunity does not end when the last reveller runs out of steam. Ms Subbiah has extended her services to online baby showers. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Updating vows” More

CHINA’S TECHNOLOGY giants are having a torrid time. At home, a regulatory crackdown is intensifying. In the latest move, on August 17th the authorities released draft antitrust rules that would hurt the business models of titans like Alibaba and Tencent. In the West, meanwhile, governments want to make it harder for Chinese companies to do business in their countries and, in America’s case, list shares. Some global asset managers are calling Chinese tech stocks “uninvestable”.The firms are thus casting around for friendlier climes. Foreign markets account for a relatively small share of the Chinese groups’ sales. Tencent made around $5bn in revenues outside mainland China last year, less than 8% of the total. So little of Alibaba’s income is derived from abroad that the company doesn’t bother publishing a geographical breakdown. If it were to start, however, no place would feature more prominently than South-East Asia.The region is home to nearly 700m people, fast-digitising economies and, crucially, no hardened geopolitical persuasion. Having taken an interest in South-East Asian online darlings such as Lazada (an e-commerce venture majority-owned by Alibaba) or Sea Group (in which Tencent holds a 23% stake), China’s giants are expanding there more directly. Last year Alibaba bought half of a 50-storey skyscraper in Singapore, the region’s commercial hub. Tencent and ByteDance, the unlisted owner of TikTok, a hit short-video app, have also opened regional hubs there and set out on local hiring sprees.Cloud computing presents a particular opportunity. Although the cloud market’s total size in South-East Asia is still relatively small, at less than $2bn a year, it grew by more than 50% in 2020, and shows no signs of slowing. And the Chinese firms are winning an ever greater share of this ever larger pie, mostly from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the American e-commerce empire’s cloud division.According to Gartner, a research firm, in 2020 Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei, a privately held telecoms colossus, had 22% of the cloud market in South-East Asia and the smaller economies of Asia Pacific, up from 18% in 2019. This year Tencent opened its first data centre in Indonesia and its second in Thailand. In June Alibaba said it would build its first in the Philippines.Unlike AWS and its American cloud rivals, Google Cloud or Microsoft’s Azure, Chinese firms are comfortable with the principle of data localisation. Many South-East Asian governments mandate that data about their citizens be processed and stored in their territory. Whereas Microsoft and AWS publish reports on the data requests made to them by governments and law-enforcement agencies, Chinese firms do not. This makes the Chinese services attractive to authorities unwilling to compromise on localised data. It also complicates embryonic efforts by America to negotiate a digital trade pact with Asian countries, which would almost certainly try to limit data localisation.Even before it contributes a big slug of revenues, business in South-East Asia is a way to learn what works outside China, notes Tan Bin Ru, the regional boss of OneConnect Financial Technology, a subsidiary of Ping An, a huge Chinese insurer. The environment is both familiar (with millions of Chinese-speakers, who often dominate commerce) and diverse (with different legal jurisdictions and a wide range of income levels). Asian companies have used the region as a staging post to global conquest in the past, most notably Toyota, which began its international expansion in Thailand in 1957. China’s giants would love to follow in its tyre tracks. More

“NERDS WILL invent the future,” declared Vinod Khosla in 2010. The venture capitalist was not talking about the sort of nerds responsible for e-commerce sites, marketplace apps or social-media platforms. Rather, his speech, delivered at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), was intended to inspire brilliant engineers and scientists to pursue climate-related innovation. The “clean tech” investment bubble had recently popped, so it then seemed an unsexy career option. But if top talent took on the hard engineering challenges involved, he argued, early commercial successes and rising public awareness would produce a “Netscape-like” moment, referring to the web browser which ushered in the consumer internet in the mid-1990s. “Ten years from now,” he predicted, “the level of invention will explode.”The billionaire investor, who has since backed Impossible Foods (which makes low-carbon alternative protein and is valued at $10bn) and QuantumScape (which develops advanced batteries and last year raised $680m via a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC), got the timing about right. The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental forecaster, calculates that new patents related to core technologies like batteries, hydrogen, smart grids and carbon capture are far outpacing those in other technologies, including fossil fuels.Money has followed the innovation. BloombergNEF, a research firm, reckons that last year investors poured more than $500bn into the “energy transition” (shorthand for decarbonising everything from energy and transport to industry and farming), twice as much as in 2010 (see chart 1). A slug of that has come in the form of risk-tolerant venture capital (VC) flooding into a range of fields (see chart 2). PwC, a consultancy, estimates that between 2013 and 2020 VC investments in climate tech grew at five times the rate of global startup funding overall. In 2021 these investments may near $60bn in America alone (see chart 3), up from $36bn last year. Can this boom avoid the fate of the previous one and give rise to a new blockbuster industry?The short answer is: quite possibly. The modern climate-tech business looks fitter and more financially sustainable than a decade ago, when VC firms lost over half of the $25bn invested in clean-tech startups between 2006 and 2011. Abe Yokell of Congruent Ventures, an investment firm, recalls that in those dark years, “If you walked into a VC boardroom and said you are working on clean tech, the senior partners left the room.”Now they are all ears, encouraged by success stories such as Beyond Meat, a rival to Impossible Foods that made its early backers a tidy sum when it went public in 2019 at a valuation of $1.5bn and is now worth nearly $8bn, and especially Tesla, the electric-car pioneer whose market capitalisation has ballooned from $1.7bn when it went public in 2010 to $718bn. The S&P Global Clean Tech Index has generated annualised total returns of more than 40% over the last three years, more than double those of the benchmark S&P 500 index of big American firms.Climate tech now makes up about a tenth of new investments made by Sequoia Capital, a legendary Silicon Valley VC firm. This month Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital, a high-flying internet investor known for early bets on Uber, Instagram and Twitter, said he would launch climate-tech VC funds worth $800m. Nancy Pfund of DBL Partners, another VC veteran, reports that whereas in 2004 she barely scraped together $75m for a clean-tech fund, her new climate-tech vehicle raised $600m—and was oversubscribed.Just as significant, Mr Yokell’s listeners have grown more diverse. Besides traditional VCs they include governments, philanthropists, Wall Street and big business. And these newcomers are investing in new ways.Stated intentionsTake states first. On August 12th America’s Department of Energy (DoE) announced a $1.5bn partnership with a division of Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), a $2bn-plus blue-sky investment fund founded by Bill Gates and a handful of his billionaire chums, including Mr Khosla. It aims to accelerate development of novel technologies in sustainable aviation fuel, green hydrogen, direct air capture and long-term energy storage. This augments the $20bn-plus loan programme that the DoE has available to boost clean energy and transport. If President Joe Biden’s infrastructure and climate proposals win final congressional approval, more funding for deployment and scale-up of projects may be on the way.European governments are splashing out, too. Earlier this year the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, teamed up with BEV on a $1bn initiative aims to build large-scale demonstration projects for clean technologies. Britain recently unveiled plans to invest $235m into climate-related technologies. Climate is a sensitive issue in China. Nonetheless, says Peggy Liu of JUCCCE, a clean energy NGO, it is the world leader in climate tech. Much of its official spending on “smart” technologies for more efficient factories, better batteries and motors is green-tinted.States are not the only converts to climate investing. Charities and family investment firms are channelling capital into early-stage firms and offering patient capital willing to stick with “tough tech” for longer than a typical VC. By one estimate, family offices of the super-rich account for roughly 10% of total climate-tech VC deals, up from perhaps 5% a decade ago.Elemental Excelerator, a Hawaii-based outfit part-funded by the Emerson Collective, a philanthropically minded firm set up by Lorene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, looks to fund “first of a kind, transformational projects”. Elemental’s early-stage investments of $43m have garnered $3.8bn in follow-on funding, says Dawn Lippert, its CEO; 20 of its 117 portfolio firms have gone public or found private buyers. Ampaire, which develops hybrid-electric aircraft, was acquired in February for $100m. Stem, an energy-storage firm, went public via a $1.3bn SPAC deal in April.Wall Street wants a look-in, too. Earlier this year JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank, said it would commit $2.5trn to sustainable investing over ten years. Of that, $1trn, which includes the bank’s own capital as well as money it raises from bond issues and flotations, is targeted explicitly at clean technologies. “Five years ago, we didn’t have the capability to invest in such firms or their VC sponsors,” says Brian Lehman of JPMorgan. Now the bank has dedicated employees like Mr Lehman who focus solely climate and green issues. It is already making smallish loans to pre-revenue firms in the sector and will expand into bridge financing between VC funding rounds and project finance for capital-intensive initiatives like indoor farms and solar-power plants.Recent weeks have also seen the emergence of a few huge private-equity (PE) funds with a similar remit. In April BlackRock, one of the world’s biggest asset managers, teamed up with Temasek, a Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund, to create a $1bn decarbonisation vehicle. And in July alone PE firms committed over $16bn to climate tech. TPG, a Texan PE titan, said it had raised $5.4bn for its Rise Climate fund. Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management announced its own $7.5bn climate-focused fund, led by Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England. General Atlantic, another American PE giant, plans to raise $4bn for BeyondNetZero (BNZ), a fund focused on climate that will be led by John Browne, a former boss of BP, a British oil supermajor.The last group of newbie climate investors comprises big companies. Many corporate giants are going beyond hollow commitments of greenery and “net zero” carbon pledges by investing directly in climate tech. According to PitchBook, a data provider, between 2017 and 2020 such corporate venture investment surpassed $40bn in all (see chart 4).It looks set to grow further. Microsoft, the software giant founded by Mr Gates which last year vowed to remove all of the greenhouse gases it has ever emitted—and more—by 2050, has set up a $1bn climate-tech fund. Its fellow Seattle tech titan, Amazon, has launched one worth $2bn, financed entirely from the company’s balance-sheet. As such, says Matt Peterson of Amazon, its investments need not meet any internal rates of return. “The focus is on decarbonisation, which is a strategic need for Amazon,” he explains. The fund will measure success by seeing how much its investments reduce the company’s carbon footprint. It has backed startups such as CarbonCure, a low-carbon cement company, Redwood Materials, a battery-recycling firm started by J.B. Straubel, formerly Tesla’s chief technology officer, and Zero Avia, a hydrogen fuel-cell aviation firm. Amazon has also given money to Elemental Excelerator.Even oil-and-gas companies and power utilities are getting in on the action. Koch Industries, America’s biggest private firm and a fossil-fuel powerhouse reviled by environmentalists, is putting around $350m of what it calls “long-term, patient capital” into the energy transformation. Early investments include EVBox Group, which develops the charging infrastructure for electric cars, and Freyr, a Norwegian firm that wants to build car-battery giga-factories in the Arctic. On August 10th Reliance, an Indian power-to-phones conglomerate, co-led a $144m fundraising round for Ambri, an energy-storage startup founded by Donald Sadoway, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a few other clean-tech firms to his name. Reliance is in talks with Ambri (which also counts Mr Khosla among its backers) to build a big battery factory in India.Path independenceBig businesses, startups and their VC backers have also learned from past mistakes and recent successes. Their approaches to climate investments have become more sophisticated as a result. One lesson is to go after a large industry that allows people to break the carbon habit without the need to sacrifice their lifestyles, says Ms Pfund of DBL Partners. Tesla, on whose board Ms Pfund sat when it was a private company, is the perfect example. Another is Apeel Sciences, which uses plant-based lipids to limit food waste, responsible for more greenhouse-gas emissions than notoriously carbon-intensive cement-making, by extending the shelf-life of produce. The firm, which DBL has backed, boasts a valuation of more than $1bn.Another novelty is the arrival of late-stage capital. BNZ will back companies from $50m to $500m or more in revenues. Lord Browne insists that, thanks both to supportive policy and to growing public awareness of global warming, there is no longer a trade-off between tackling greenhouse gases and making a profit. On the contrary, he says, firms can both reduce emissions and earn bigger returns. He is on the lookout for companies that could become “the Amazon of electricity”. He has no doubts that “some are going to grow to that size”.The rise of late-stage VC and participation of PE firms is a healthy development for the startup ecosystem, thinks Shaun Maguire of Sequoia. Many climate-tech firms require innovative debt financing, so PE “can be quite useful”, he says. They help solve the problem for the 95% of entrepreneurs who have historically failed to secure follow-on funding, agrees Laura-Marie Töpfer of Extantia, a Berlin-based climate-VC fund.Plenty of late-stage and growth-capital may give earlier-stage VCs more confidence with startups working on hard tech. And the strong environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments of PE funds will dramatically change founders’ incentives. To be an attractive investment, Ms Töpfer says, founders and their backers must now ensure that ESG “is baked into firms from day one”.The final lesson is the importance of collaboration. Where in the past VC firms backed startups chasing similar approaches to making thin-film solar panels, new climate-tech investors are open to working together to spread risk and speed up development. Reliance would be a customer of the new giga-factory, not just its sponsor. Besides forking over $1bn to Rivian, which makes electric vehicles, Amazon has also ordered 100,000 vans to help the e-commerce giant decarbonise its delivery fleet. No VC has that sort of purchasing power.Brookfield wants to use the low-carbon know-how from its many investments in big renewable-energy projects to help big companies meet ambitious decarbonisation targets. Connor Teskey of Brookfield says the sort of partner his firm has in mind is ArcelorMittal. In July the giant steelmaker unveiled a decarbonisation strategy to cut its global carbon emissions by 25% by 2030 at a cost of $10bn. “A tech VC fund with just $100m can’t do this,” says Mr Teskey. Large firms want “a partner who can write you a $1bn cheque”.This new spirit of co-operation matters because, in the words of Carmichael Roberts of BEV, “in climate tech, everything is hard.” Everything, that is, except raising capital.For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

IN SILICON VALLEY, running one or two startups into the ground is an essential step on an entrepreneur’s journey to success. For their European counterparts a single bankruptcy can derail a career. Being branded a failure once is all banks and other investors need to steer clear for ever. A new study shows the extent of the stigma a past failure can have on potential business-builders—and how it can be remedied.Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

FIDJI SIMO has a back story unusual even by the standards of Silicon Valley’s immigrant elite. Born in the port of Sète, in the Languedoc region of southern France, she was raised in a family of fishermen. With her father always at sea, she barely travelled. Yet she had style—her first name comes from a Guy Laroche perfume—and she had ambition. At a young age she vaulted from the Mediterranean, via the prestigious HEC business school in Paris, to the coastline in northern California better known for the internet than fishing nets. There she made her name at Facebook’s social-media empire. As she puts it, “I jumped into the rocket ship.”On August 2nd, at 35 years old, she became chief executive of Instacart, an equally rocket-like online-grocery platform. The San Francisco-based firm has become a household name in America and Canada during the covid-19 pandemic for its app giving digital access to the shelves of 600 retailers, big and small, as well as its 500,000-strong army of gig-economy workers who pick and pack goods from supermarkets and deliver them to customers.The job thrusts the Frenchwoman, like a modern-day Joan of Arc, into a pivotal position in the ongoing trolley wars. She has dark forces to fight: Instacart, she claims, provides supermarkets with the technology to battle Amazon’s expanding e-realm. She has revolutionary (some say heretical) ideas: she hopes to bring Facebook-like targeted advertising to the grocery-shopping experience. And she is on a mission: most of her top executives, 70% of her contract workers and four-fifths of her customers are women. The executive tilt is “absolutely strategic”, she says.Yet she is also expected soon to lead Instacart to an initial public offering that will probably value it higher than most American supermarkets. (The firm declines to discuss a listing.) To underpin such a valuation, she needs to find ways of making it profitable—without alienating the supermarkets that Instacart considers its partners. The higher the valuation Instacart achieves, the more it suggests that supermarkets will get the short end of the stick. As some of Instacart’s exclusive arrangements with them reportedly begin to expire, the big grocers may be realising this.Far from the digital throne room of Facebook, Ms Simo has now thrust herself into one of the gnarliest corners of the real world, grocery, in one of the most cut-throat businesses, delivery. If the economics of delivery platforms, from ride-sharing to meals, are tough, those of hauling baskets of produce are even more so. Supermarket margins, already thin, are falling, according to Bain, a consultancy, leaving little left over for the costs of dropping stuff on doorsteps. Shoppers are increasingly price-sensitive; hence the rise of discounters such as Aldi and Lidl. At the height of the pandemic stay-at-home orders gave people little choice but to pay extra for delivery. But as conditions return to normal, so will cost-consciousness. In the three months to June, says Bloomberg Second Measure, a data company, year-on-year grocery-delivery sales fell, after stratospheric rises in most of the previous 12 months.Ms Simo acknowledges that after a breathless year, Instacart is at a “new resting heart rate”. As the online share of groceries in America rises from a modest 8% of total sales, she sees plenty of growth ahead. But competition is heating up. Walmart, America’s biggest grocer, may have regained the upper hand in delivery. Amazon Fresh is a force to be reckoned with. Rival upstarts, such as DoorDash and Uber Eats, are expanding from meals to everyday goods (and, according to the Information, a tech newsletter, have rejected Instacart’s offers to merge or team up, respectively).Meanwhile, as the IPO approaches, investors will want to assess Instacart’s path to profitability. Its most recent valuation of $39bn is already higher than that of Kroger, America’s second-biggest supermarket chain, though Kroger’s revenues, at $132bn last year, dwarf those of Instacart, at $1.5bn. The implication is that investors believe either that Instacart will displace its supermarket partners in the years ahead, or that it will become a high-margin digital-ads business. Ms Simo insists it will be the latter.She is losing no time. Already, she says, ad sales (reportedly $300m last year, or a fifth of revenues) are growing at triple-digit rates. But that’s just for starters. Within days of taking over the company, she raided Facebook for its top marketing executive, Carolyn Everson, naming her Instacart’s president. Ms Simo sees huge potential. Groceries, as she points out, are the largest segment in the retail sector. Until recently the $1.5trn consumer-goods industry was unable to target shoppers directly as they put groceries into their trolleys. They now can via internet shopping, and all the more effectively on the small screen of a mobile phone. Targeted ads give them even more bang for their buck.Further supporting growth will be automation. Instacart, Ms Simo says, will continue to expand its numbers of packers and deliverers. But it recently signed a deal with Fabric, an Israeli firm, to build small-scale robotic warehouses attached to its partners’ supermarkets, which will make picking and packing quicker, enabling Instacart to cut delivery costs. The firm will also ramp up efforts to win hearts and minds of customers and staff. One approach, clearly, is to pay more attention to the female perspective, not least because women do most of the grocery shopping. Another will be to make online shopping more entertaining.Checking outHow much shoppers will welcome a blizzard of ads as they peruse virtual aisles remains to be seen. For supermarkets, the big questions are how much they will sacrifice direct relationships with customers who access them via Instacart, and who will reap most rewards from the ad bonanza. Ms Simo insists the benefits will be shared between Instacart and its partners. But, says Steve Caine of Bain, many of America’s big supermarkets are building their own online platforms to rely less on Instacart. The fightback has begun. It may not be a Hundred Years’ War. But it will be a long one. ■This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Joan of Instacart” More

THERE IS AN old joke that the key to success in life is sincerity. If you can fake that, the saying goes, then you have got it made. On reflection, however, the essential quality for surviving at work is not sincerity, but flexibility.When Bartleby started his career in 1980, personal computers were the preserve of hobbyists and sending a letter required the passing of a handwritten draft to the typing pool. Phone calls came through the switchboard. Office life was so dependent on shuffling paper that staplers, paper clips and Tipp-Ex were essential. No one had a mobile phone so swift contact was impossible; this correspondent once sat for 45 minutes in a restaurant waiting for a guest who had been shown to another table and was miffed about his non-appearance.Now office workers must grapple with a host of technologies. They need to know how to raise their hand (and mute themselves) on Zoom, track changes in a Google doc and make financial calculations on a spreadsheet. They must switch between applications, and back again, several times an hour. They must learn to use (or at least understand) new jargon even when it seems fatuous or irritating.The need to adapt to change has not been confined to office work, of course. Those employed in manufacturing have had to cope with new techniques and new machines. Many of them have had to change sectors in order to find work. Manufacturing employment has fallen from 30.2% of the workforce in 1991 to 22.6% in 2019 across the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Retail workers have grappled with bar codes, automated checkouts, contactless payments and click-and-collect. But office workers have also had to adjust to one hugely significant change: a breakdown of the barriers between work and home life. The advent of email and the smartphone means that workers can be contacted at any time of the day or night. If the phone rings at 10pm, it’s probably not your mother, it’s your boss.Employees have to adjust to many corporate cultures over the course of their careers. Only a minority of workers ever spend their working lives at a single organisation. The median job tenure for workers aged 25 and over in America is around five years and has changed little in recent decades. Public-sector workers stay longer in their jobs than those in the private sector, who last around four years. In a 40-year career, that implies the average private-sector employee might work for ten different firms. On top of that, globalisation has meant that workers have had to get used to dealing with foreign customers and suppliers, colleagues working across different time zones, and sometimes foreign owners.Over the years, employees—particularly men—have had to adapt to new social norms. What used to be known as “laddish humour” is now rightly deemed to be demeaning to female colleagues. Boozy lunchtimes were once common, but are now frowned upon. Some middle-aged workers have been slow to accept this shift but employers have become steadily less tolerant of such behaviour.During the pandemic, workers have had to show even more flexibility, keeping in touch with their colleagues and maintaining their productivity while juggling child care and the need to avoid infection. Not everyone has enjoyed it, but the ability to conquer the tyranny of the 9-to-5 routine is a very positive development. Monday mornings no longer seem quite such a dreadful prospect if they don’t involve a stressful commute.It is actually a great tribute to modern workers that they have adjusted splendidly to all these changes. But it gets more difficult as you grow older. Attitudes harden; habits become ingrained. There are many things which Bartleby finds puzzling about modern life. Once, talking loudly on the street was a sign of madness; now people are happy to disclose intimate details of their personal lives while bellowing on their mobile phones. Electric scooters seem to offer all of the dangers of bicycling (and a lot more risk for pedestrians sharing the pavement) without any of the health benefits. And most perplexing of all is that a man with the character and record of Boris Johnson has become his country’s prime minister.This puzzlement is a hint that this columnist is insufficiently flexible to cover the modern world and needs to retire. The danger is that one becomes a caricature of a grumpy old man and, like his fictional namesake, Bartleby would “prefer not to”. Many thanks for reading the column over the past three years.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Get flexible or get going” More

IN 1908 ASHTON VALVE COMPANY built a factory on the corner of Binney Street and First Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In what was a high-tech industry of the day, it made gauges, valves, whistles, clocks and other gadgets that helped make steam boilers less susceptible to blowing up and killing people. Just over 100 years later, in 2010, another purveyor of a life-saving technology moved into Ashton’s long-abandoned premises: Moderna.In the past year the biotech darling has become synonymous with the fight against covid-19. Its ingenious mRNA vaccine has, like a similar one developed by Pfizer, an American drug giant, and BioNTech, a German startup, saved millions of lives. Moderna’s success has also brought attention to America’s biotechnology industry, a lot of it centred around Cambridge. Home to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is the closest that the biotech business currently has to a Silicon Valley.And the industry is booming. Since 2010 an index of biotech firms listed on the Nasdaq has quintupled in value (see chart), and the number of companies in it has more than doubled, to 269. Between 2011 and 2020 the money that biotech startups raised in American initial public offerings (IPOs) ballooned from $4bn to $65bn. So far this year venture capitalists have poured more than $20bn into pharmaceutical and biotech firms, not far from last year’s record tally of $27bn.Cambridge is filled with cranes and new buildings, dull on the outside but bursting with exciting science within. In next-door Boston new laboratories are going up around the revamped Seaport. Prices for lab space reportedly reach $160 a square foot, perhaps the costliest commercial real estate in America not at street level.The pace of the industry’s expansion would have been inconceivable 10-15 years ago, marvels Jean-François Formela of Atlas Venture, a venture-capital (VC) firm. Businesses are popping up everywhere, including down the hall from Mr Formela’s office. Flagship Pioneering, a VC firm which guides entrepreneurs from a promising idea to a business that can attract outside investors, has spun out 26 companies since 2013. Its founder, Noubar Afeyan (who is also Moderna’s chairman), hopes to spin out up to ten a year from now on.The boom has several causes. Tim Haines, chairman of Abingworth, a London-based asset manager focused on life sciences, notes that many investors have been swept up in the notion of “philanthropic capitalism”: making money from products that could benefit society. Other reasons are more hard-headed. According to Mr Haines’s estimates, 64% of drugs in late-stage development are being concocted by youngish biotech companies built around a novel technology rather than by big pharma firms such as Pfizer (which often team up with smaller biotechs like BioNTech, or acquire them, to juice up development pipelines).Many of these technologies are themselves the result of recent advances in cell and gene therapies, and ways of delivering them and of identifying which patients are likely to benefit from them. New money is flowing into firms developing treatments for cancer, illnesses of the immune system or the brain, and even infectious diseases. Everyone is vying to be the next Moderna, whose market capitalisation has jumped from $5bn when it went public in late 2018 to $187bn. Many are hoping to emulate it by expanding from developing therapies to manufacturing them.Walking past Moderna’s headquarters just off bustling Binney Street it is easy to overlook the risks. People with both a PhD in life sciences and managerial nous are a rare breed. Unlike brainstorming the next app, life science cannot be done on Zoom. Many clever ideas never come to fruition. Those that do become therapies often cost a lot, which increasingly angers both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and has led to calls for price controls.The greatest danger is a common one for many startups: uncertain profitability. Only one in six companies in the Nasdaq biotech index made money in 2020. The remaining five-sixths lost a combined $33bn. Vertex, a star graduate of Binney Street that has relocated to Seaport, lost money from its founding in 1989 until 2017. Moderna turned a profit last quarter for the first time in a decade. Its wannabe imitators can at least rest assured that biotech investors are a patient bunch. More

AMONG THE records broken at the Tokyo Olympics, one went uncelebrated: the games were the least-watched in decades. In America just 15.5m people tuned in each night, the fewest since NBCUniversal, now part of Comcast’s cable empire, began covering the event in 1988. Viewership was 42% lower than at the Rio games in 2016. Broadcasters in Europe recorded similar falls. Brands that had paid to advertise alongside the jamboree complained. NBC scrambled to offer them free spots to make up for the ratings shortfall. Yet the Olympics illustrated a puzzle of advertising. Even as audiences desert TV, brands are paying as much as ever for commercials. Tokyo was an uneven playing field. Many events took place while Americans and Europeans were asleep. Stars such as Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka left early. Worst of all, covid-19 meant no spectators and face-masks all round. But the collapse in viewership wasn’t a one-off. Tokyo’s opening ceremony was watched by 36% fewer Americans on the day than watched Rio get under way in 2016. Rio’s audience in turn was 35% lower than London’s in 2012.While viewers have disappeared, advertisers have stuck around. NBC sold more than $1.2bn in ads for Tokyo, about the same as in Rio. Even after dishing out the compensatory ads, it expects to make a profit on the $1bn or so it paid for the rights to televise the games. It has also managed, in the words of Jeff Shell, its boss, to use them “as a firehose to promote everything else that we’re doing at the company”—above all its streaming service, Peacock, which zoomed up the app-store charts.The games exemplify a broader trend. This year the average American will watch 172 minutes of broadcast and cable television a day, 100 minutes less than ten years ago, estimates eMarketer, a research firm. Among the so-called “money demographic” of 18- to 49-year-olds, viewership has fallen by half as audiences have gone online. Even so, spending on TV ads is remarkably stable. In 2021 brands will blow $66bn on American commercials, about the same as every year for the past decade.TV remains “the worst form of advertising, except for all the others”, says Brian Wieser of GroupM, the world’s biggest ad-buyer. The big streamers, such as Netflix and Disney+, are ad-free zones. Brands are wary of YouTube’s user-generated content. And ad-supported streamers like Peacock and Disney’s Hulu still lack enough ad space to move big marketing budgets. As a result, advertisers keep ploughing money into TV, even as returns diminish.Perhaps not for long. YouTube is making inroads into brand advertising as its content mix becomes more professional. Amazon is expected to run ads in its National Football League coverage next year. By combining premium content with targeted commercials, the e-empire is going to unlock “huge buckets” of ad dollars, predicts Andrew Lipsman of eMarketer. In 2019 advertising on streaming services in America was worth only 9% as much as adverts on cable and broadcast TV, eMarketer says. In 2023 that figure will be 32%.Where will this leave events like the Olympics? Probably still on the podium. Ad money will drain out of daytime and some primetime TV, expects Mr Lipsman. But big, live spectacles will be as desirable as ever. “There is nothing more powerful in media than the 17 straight days of Olympics dominance,” summed up NBC’s sports chief, Pete Bevacqua. As in sport, it doesn’t matter that you aren’t as good as you used to be, as long as you beat the competition. ■ More