I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we in the UK tend to talk about investment. And it’s all to do with what I call “the colour of money”: but no, that’s not the 1986 sequel to “The Hustler” with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. It’s about the relative risk profile of individual investments relative [...]
Next week [21st March 2012], I’ll be giving a talk at the Kingston Round Table of Inventors, a thoroughly lovely local inventor group that meets once a month or so at Kingston University, chaired by the well-respected Bob Lindsey. Feel free to come along, everyone’s welcome & there’s normally lively discussion in the Grove Tavern afterwards (a [...]
Alex Payne is a software engineer (& Scala fan), an early Twitter employee, and now an angel investor: he writes succinctly and well, while pulling few punches. His excellent recent post “On Business Madness” tries to nail a number of Big Bad Ideas floating around the startup business noosphere. I’ll Powerpointify his major points first so I can get on to discussing [...]
Next week will see my first proper Nanodome pitch following a fair old period developing stuff, so I’ve spent a bit of time this week revising my pitch deck, and even had a chance to run it past KRTI’s Bob Lindsey (who often attends 3Cs meetings) over coffee at the Surbiton Brasserie (very good hot chocolate [...]
Sometimes, the verb ‘is’ surprises you, by introducing a link between two things you didn’t previously know were the same.For example, philosophy students typically get fed Gottlob Frege’s example of Hesperus (“der Abendstern”, the evening star) and Phosphorus (“der Morgenstern”, the morning star): though a shepherd may have noticed both stars, he/she may be surprised to be told that Hesperus is Phosphorus, [...]
As a UK entrepreneur looking for finance, I’ve managed to meet a good number of angel investors (130+), encompassing the good, the bad, and (indeed) the ugly faces of capitalism. For all their differences, many have strikingly similar attributes:- the Home Counties mini-mansion; the trophy wife (yes, to surely nobody’s surprise most UK angels are male); the small ‘Me [...]
As an entrepreneur, you’ve probably noticed that the Internet is crammed full of bodacious startup advice, mostly blogged by VCs and angels masquerading as normal (even altruistic!) human beings. Yes, they simply ‘want the best for you’, and they have no hidden agenda at all. And almost all of them are in the US. Now… something (if [...]
Whilst scattergun blogging about various angel funding myths a few days ago, I pointed out that – though it’s entirely true there aren’t any statistics on the subject I’ve ever seen – my best guess is that roughly 75% of recent angel funding has been into working companies typically suffering [thanks to the UK banks] from dysfunctional [...]
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 [...]
As your tech startup grows, it’s always a huge relief to reach milestones – particularly when (thanks to the way bootstrapping makes development cheaper but s-l-o-w-e-r) they can be a fair old while in coming. Yesterday’s big milestone here in Nanodome Towers was getting our final camera PCB to boot from a memory card far [...]
