Lessons from the father of venture capital

French politicians often look enviously across the Atlantic at the entrepreneurial successes of the U.S. economy, such as Google Inc., Apple Inc., Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. So it is a heavy irony that the man who founded the U.S. venture capital industry, helping to create many multibillion-dollar companies, came from France.

In "Creative Capital," Spencer E. Ante, a Business Week journalist, recounts the life of a 20th century Renaissance man, Georges Doriot.

Born in Paris in 1899, Doriot was the only son of a promising industrialist at the Peugeot car company and his schoolteacher wife. At age 21, Doriot sailed by steamship to the U.S. from his native France and went on to become a brigadier general in World War II, one of the most influential professors at Harvard Business School and founder of Instead, Europe's first business school.

But his main achievement was to pioneer the U.S. venture capital industry in 1946 by setting up American Research & Development, which backed one of the first blockbuster technology start-ups, Digital Equipment Corp.