The big UK startup news of the last 24 hours was the launch of StartupBritain, a work-in-progress portal offering limited promotional discounts on various services (typically 10% or 1 month), a fairly sub-par startup link farm and (at some unspecified point in the future) some kind of unspecified startup mentoring facility. As conceptual (as opposed [...]
As I blogged here recently, a startup is in many ways a tiny social revolution: it tries to change how its customers act, how they think, and how their world is connected together. Furthermore, a key measure of a startup’s influence and, well, ‘success‘ is the degree to which it changes how social agents in their [...]
What kind of startup is your company? A bad startup is an exercise in applied greed, where its principals construct a series of sophisticated simulacra of market excitement all the while grooming foolhardy buyers to misvalue it at each stage (seed, Series A/B, exit). In fact, many startups set out on this path, though a [...]
Even though so much self-serving, retrospective nonsense has been written about the tricky relationship between investors and entrepreneurs, almost all of it is supported only by itself rather than by anything so useful as evidence or even (Lord help us all!) genuine insight into investment psychology. What is more, atop these wobbly foundations is perched a massive [...]
Announcing InsertNameHere, a high-growth, highly capital-intensive, solid-gold once-in-a-recession investment opportunity. InsertNameHere builds on its founders’ deep experience in heavily-leveraged compressive carbon transformation [*], yet takes that to a whole new level – fully virtualized service services. Its dramatic new core technology is a 24/7 100% online meta-toolkit for startups and SMEs looking to exploit new [...]
The more I think about it, there’s something funny going on in StartupLand, and it seems to centre on declarational information asymmetry – the notion that knowing more (but not telling anyone) helps make Startup A worth more than a similar (but overtly open) Startup B, better known as “stealth mode”. Having just endured 20 years [...]
I thought, given the bold implicit claim on this blog’s mast-head, I ought to at least mention in passing how far towards its mythical future $1bn valuation Nanodome has progressed over the last few months. The honest (i.e. startup theatre-free) answer is: it’s hard to tell – as always, there’s good news and bad news… [...]
OK, the following probably won’t mean much to (the overwhelming majority of?) startup people under 30, but it is what it is. When I was a kid, I never really got Bananarama. If you managed to miss that particular treat, it was a three-girl pop band singing not brilliantly in slightly jokey videos wearing way [...]
I try to keep up with startup-related forums & newsfeeds, I really do: but I have to say it’s a challenge that’s getting harder and harder. It’s not simply the continued absence of any genuinely good news that makes it painful, but the overwhelming preponderance of ‘startup theatre’ – the pouty cheeks and defiant jaw [...]
Why are so many people in the startup community so obsessed with business models? Strip away all the McKinseyite high-concept clutter around them, and I think you’ll find that nearly all so-called “business models” reduce down to only two important aspects:- How the company fits (or doesn’t fit) into a given industrial / cultural / [...]
