Looked at from that perspective, 99 out of 100 “successful” businesses fail, so the dot ers are actually doing 10 times better than the big, established companies.Dot s are startups and startups mainly fail It has always been thus, and it will likely always be thus. It’s probably never been easier to start a company than it is right now, but that doesn’t change the reality: it’s very, very hard to start up a human enterprise.Lots can go wrong – and does. Great ideas get sunk almost daily because people can’t get it together to agree on a business path, because they’re not experienced enough, because they don’t market well, because they market well but have lousy products, because they don’t understand customers, because they didn’t really check the market out, because they charge too much, because they charge too little, because they give their product away free, because they didn’t give their product away free, and for at least 100,000 other reasons.And then there’s things that were lousy ideas to start with. Look at any venture capitalist’s list of funded companies and this will become painfully obvious. It’s even obvious to the VCs, who’ll tell you they have no plans whatsoever to offer additional funding to two-thirds of their own startups. VCs call it “drowning the kittens” – the Darwinian process by which they winnow the fit winners from the unfit losers. And sometimes, great idea, great people, and great execution hit bad luck and disappear anyway.

It happens.So just because recent events have reminded “overly exuberant” (a term I usually take to mean “greedy”) investors that startups are risky, doesn’t mean the people who do them are likely to stop doing them. Hope springs eternal, I guess.cg gulker . Jacqueline de Rojas is a good example of a global citizen: her father was Chinese, she studied in Germany, was married to a Dane and a Colombian, and is now with a Gaelic-speaking Irishman. Jacqueline de Rojas is a good example of a global citizen: her father was Chinese, she studied in Germany, was married to a Dane and a Colombian, and is now with a Gaelic-speaking Irishman.
These days, though, the managing director of Informix in the UK moves in less cosmopolitan circles and commutes to work in an industrial park near Heathrow from her home in unexotic High Wycombe. She has a much more pressing image problem – that of transforming a $1.3bn database company into a serious internet player.Other IT giants such as Intel have striven to reinvent their brands and switch competencies over the years with varying degrees of success, but Informix’s volte-face came relatively late – just three years ago after 17 years in the database business. Its approach has been to leverage “dumb data” into smart solutions: helping firms identify customers, cut inventory costs and set up shop on the web. Expanding into consultancy and incubation, it now takes equity in startups, powers sites for Lastminute and the BBC, and is developing a product portfolio that includes GeoW p, a City information system accessed by mobile phone, and Cloudsync, a data back-up system.Jean-Yves Dexmier, the CEO of Informix, came up with the change in strategy and head-hunted de Rojas – at the time a senior vice-president at Computer Associates – to implement it.

De Rojas recalls: “Jean-Yves told me, ‘I can only meet you at a certain hotel at 6am and I have to be gone by 7.15am.’ It was all rather mysterious but I’ve never met a more charming man. We chatted and he said, ‘Will you join us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ I didn’t want to join a traditional database company. He said, ‘That’s good, because we’re not.’ He went on to talk about his vision and said, ‘When you make a difference at Informix, it has your name on.’ That made me feel very warm.”De Rojas, 37, was just as adaptable as the company she now heads. After studying European business, she took a job in recruitment, soon leaving it “because I didn’t want to work with a product that talked and said, ‘I don’t want this job’”. She went to work for her biggest client, Synon, looking after international affairs and helping the company grow from 30 to 300 in three years.

Then came a stint as the head of a small startup, Implementers, after which she moved to a company called Legent. When it was acquired by Computer Associates, de Rojas leapt back into the big pond with a splash: she was appointed head of new business.She claims a brush with sexism only spurred her on. “I was told by my new boss, ‘I never employ women, but I’ve decided to employ you.’ He wanted to put the cat among the pigeons. I worked the only way I could, which was to change the rules and make it a new game.”I sucked the living daylights out of our customer base and my department went from four to 156 people. Something like that gives you a lot of confidence and it was a huge triumph. My boss let me run the business and didn’t meddle.”It’s been hard going into a managing director’s role at Informix – my days are longer and the information overload is enormous – but I’ve taken a common-sense approach. If I don’t understand a question, I ask someone to explain the context.