UCL “Entrepreneurship Guest Lecture”, free beer & wine… :-)

Just to let you know that I spoke with the UCL organizer lady about my guest entrepreneurship lecture this Thursday (24th November 2011). To my pleasant surprise, she told me (a) that the lecture funding includes a modest amount of beer and wine available afterwards for mingling and chatting (& if/when that runs out, my Plan A is to decamp to the Marlborough Arms nearby), and (b) that all are welcome, not just UCL and LBS students and staff. Naturally, I immediately invited everyone on the OpenCoffee London forum, but we’ll have to see how many of its 3252 members turn up.

Hope to see you there! I’ll be the one at the front.

UCL “Entrepreneurship Guest Lecture” update…

Before I say anything else, a great big (actual, non-ironic) *** thank you! *** to all the kind London OpenCoffee’ers who so generously gave me their feedback on the first (extremely rough) draft of my presentation for next month’s UCL Entrepreneurship Guest Lecture that I posted here a few days ago. Yes, it definitely needed more structure (thanks Larry), more clarity of purpose and less negativity (thanks Johnathan), less unnecessary stridency (thanks Elina), and plenty of other faults corrected (thanks everyone else). Of course, version two is still essentially a list (sorry Iqbal), but fictionalizing all the strands into an ur-narrative continues to be beyond my meagre abilities.

So anyway, here’s version 2 of my presentation, now (loosely following Johnathan’s suggestion) called “Dangerous Reasons: What convinces entrepreneurs to start up?”, because that’s ultimately the problem: that entrepreneurs try to convince themselves that there are countless good reasons for starting up. Of course, in reality here in the UK there are lots of non-reasons to startup (which I classify as “Mythologies” and “Misconceptions“), quite a few good reasons not to startup (all classified under “Grim Realism”), but sadly almost no genuine reasons to start up. Hopefully the revised presentation will make the differences between the various groups a lot clearer than before: essentially, ‘mythologies’ are where other people try to fool you, while ‘misconceptions’ are where you try to fool yourself.

Note that even though the slides are now structured reasonably well, they’re still not yet “dressed for success” (they all definitely need a bit of eye candy). In the first section, I’ve included in brackets some asides I’d chat over the slides: if you’ve met me, you can probably imagine me saying them – please don’t conclude that I’m negative, I’m honestly just the messenger here, so try not to shoot! Really, if you have good news on starting up in the UK, please tell me, I’ll be the first to cheer!

Please let me know what you think… again, your comments are very much appreciated!