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 [...]
Few people have heard of the Tech City Investment Organization, and even fewer realize that one of the main reasons it was set up was to encourage overseas companies to park themselves in Shoreditch, to “create more employment more quickly”. Hence the eyecatching entrance of Google and Cisco into the whole Tech City parade: of [...]
The biggest shadow hanging over nearly every business book is the ghost of unwarrantable universalism. Which is a fancy way of saying that, whenever any business writer claims “Methodology X worked for me, so it will work for you [despite the fact that your situation is almost certainly completely different]“, you know that pretty much every bullshit warning bell [...]
First off, a great big thank you! to all the people who came along to my entrepreneur guest lecture at UCL last week. Apparently one attendee was spotted IMing something along the lines of “came here expecting to be cynical, but this guy’s more than cynical enough already“. Well… bruised: yes, cynical: not really. And a special thank [...]
Willkommen! Earlier this week, the Technology Strategy Board’s held its “Innovate11″ conference at the Business Design Centre in Islington: but rather than traipse into town and lose a day’s work, I decided to stay working at my PC with the TSB’s live web stream burbling in the background. As you’d hope/expect, there were plenty of familiar faces [...]
…how would they make films? First of all, they wouldn’t do anything so consciously planned as write a script – oh no, that would be far too deterministic and control freakish. Only an MBA trapped in the early 1970s would start with a plot treatment, let alone a shooting script, right? No, the #1 thing Lean Startups [...]
Eric Ries’ 2011 book “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses” has garnered lots of attention, and indeed plenty of favourable reviews. He’s a thoughtful guy, who has been gradually building up interest in his “Lean Startup” ideas over the last few years: if you haven’t really heard of it, [...]
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 [...]
Opportunity is rather a strange thing. In many ways, it’s the life-blood of business: but what kind of entrepreneur would have the cojones to pierce the pretence of business strategy and put their job title down as “Shameless Opportunist“? [To be honest, I did try it for a while, but got bored and moved on]. Perhaps we collectively need to kill the stigma attached [...]
And so it was that eighteen startups bearing £100K TSB promissory match-funding notes came to London to stand before a roomful of people (a good few of whom were genuinely angels) and have their eight-minute pitches evaluated for investability. On the same bill was the comic relief, the twenty nearly-but-not-quite-funded startups - myself included – whose two-minute pitches were [...]
