In a few weeks’ time, I’ll be giving a lecture at University College London as part of their Entrepreneurship Guest Lecture series. Between you and me, my guess is that the organizers asked me because I’m specifically not one of the numerous “startup success theatre” aren’t-I-clever-for-getting-funded-don’t-you-wish-you-were-as-clever-as-me types you typically find putting themselves forward for lectures. Rather, what seems [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A few quick thoughts before I head off to the TechHub seed funding meetup this evening. Note that the following list is neither definitive, ironic, sarcastic, nor even grumpy: it’s just a whole bunch of contemporary startup things I genuinely don’t get, however much in vogue they may be. (1) Whatever Sweary Dave McClure says, 500startups seems [...]
One thing that can be annoying about Internet startup people is the way some of them act as though they themselves invented the whole idea of using metrics to improve their business. These people seem to extend Dave McClure’s well-known AARRR model all the way to AARRRGH (“Acquisition – Activation – Retention – Referral – Revenue… Grandeur… Hubris“), [...]
Time, gentlemen, puh-lease! Yes, I’m calling time on UK angel investing – it’s the end of the line, take all your bags with you, thank you for travelling with the UK startup industry, nothing to see now, move on. And here’s why. As with most complex systems, there’s no single reason for UK angel investing [...]
Mike Maples hates them (he thinks they’re static, when startups are dynamic), and that the way business plan competitions are promoted by business schools sends out completely the wrong signals to entrepreneurs. Dave McClure hates them too (and for all his sweariness, he’s not actually much of a hater), while Fred Destin says: It’s been said 150 [...]
No sooner had I wracked my startup soul posting about the Zen of startup valuation (basically, that the value of the company doesn’t lie in its ‘plan’ but in its ability to improvise and execute money-making tactics) than I almost inevitably stumbled upon an excellent video of über-angel Mike Maples, for whom even the term “super-angel” [...]
