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 [...]
For want of a better phrase, you can think of ’anti-knowledge’ as something passed off as the truth despite not actually being true. Of course, an outright lie would clearly qualify (duh), but probably the most dangerous type of anti-knowledge is a persuasive story built around a lie, particularly ones which serve to define an entire way of thinking. [...]
As recommended yesterday by Ben Markland on the London OpenCoffee meetup forum, here’s a video from July 2011 you might enjoy: a 50-minute lecture + Q&A session by Fred Destin at Miniseedcamp Ljubljana. Fred’s a smart guy, and manages to squeeze in the whole lifecycle of startups: founders (the magic number is two), funding, launch, build, the [...]
As I blogged here a while back, there’s broad agreement amongst the startup chatterati that traditional business plans are dead. MBA thinking is (allegedly) useless for entrepreneurs, bootstrapping (and low-end funded) companies are stuck at the front end of the [necessity-----strategy] spectrum, everyone is talking about Eric Ries’ “Lean Startups” (even if nobody yet knows [...]
Ohhhhhh dear: Monday evening saw a group from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) come to TechHub in Old Town Street with a £1m grant giveaway, fully expecting to have rose petals strewn in their path by hordes of grateful self-funded digital entrepreneurs (à la #StartupBritain launch). Unfortunately, they were not so much “egged on” as [...]
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 night before last, I had a particularly vivid dream: I was playing an unknown arcade game (actually, it was a vertical-scrolling “shoot’em up” like a desert-themed “1942″ but with Cold War-era planes) and had just reached the end-of-level ‘Optimus Prime’-style Japanese robot boss when the machine abruptly reset itself and went into a pre-rendered [...]
I’m confused and angry: for heaven’s sake, what’s a startup guy supposed to do? On the one hand you’ve got Steve Blank proposing his Customer Development startup loop, Eric Ries proposing his Lean Startup development loop, and (one you may not have read about) Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation loop. These three dovetail neatly into [...]
Edited about 1:30 into a short video on London Business School’s ‘Enterprise 100′ homepage (click on the [Play] button near the top right to see it), there are two short presentations by BBC TV presenter Evan Davis. His presence there should be no great surprise: Davis’ pre-TV background was as an economist at the Institute [...]
