Essays
Excessive focus on a personal brand is terrible. Personal branding — assuming brand can even be applied to a complex human being in the same way it can to a commodity — is mostly a by-product of something else: making valuable and meaningful contributions in your areas of interest. People who tirelessly
Essays
I’ve been reading Fred Wilson’s blog for almost a decade and his writing inspired my move into venture capital some years back. He’s a seasoned early-stage investor and a co-founder of Union Square Ventures, one of the best venture capital firms of all time. (They invested in
Essays
The excitement that surrounded the personal computer revolution in the 1980s and the advent of the world wide web in the 1990s has surely been eclipsed by what’s going on in artificial intelligence today. Bill Gates – who was around for both eras – believes that the “development of AI is
Essays
University has never been more expensive, so is it still worth it if it will cost new students £100,000 in graduate debt and take 40 years to repay? Recently we’ve seen the cost of everyday items skyrocket. From pasta prices to fuel and energy bills hitting record highs.
Essays
The world emits about 50 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases annually. In contrast, the average UK citizen contributes roughly 10 tonnes each year to the grand total. This represents one part in every five billion parts of global emissions. It’s one fifty-millionth of a percent (0.00000002%). In other
Excerpts
How will governments and society respond to a global climate disaster? Kim Stanley Robinson paints a vivid picture of what’s possible in a brilliant work of fiction that straddles science, economics, and politics. In The Ministry for the Future, Robinson takes the reader to a near future and lays
Essays
‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’ is a fantastic read for people who are new to climate change. To my surprise, Bill Gates is also relatively new to the space (although he’s ahead by over a decade compared to most people!) He changed his mind on the topic in
Essays
Most people believe that only the Bank of England can create money. Many people also believe that high street banks can only lend money if they have enough savers’ deposits to lend from. But as I’ll explain shortly, both views are mistaken. It’s true that once upon a
Announcements
This month I’m excited to join the consumer fintech startup tickr, and since a few friends have been curious about the move, I thought it would be good to share a brief note on what got me here. Technology Innovation and the Gains of the Future My fascination with
Essays
Do more, we’re told. You’ll be happier when you do more. This is because when you achieve more, you’ll be more. ‘More of what?’ you say. ‘More worthy,’ they say. People who achieve lots are admired by society. People who do little, well, we forget about them,
Essays
Venture capital is a power law business: most of the underlying investments fail¹ while a tiny fraction generate the bulk of returns. This is in contrast to normal distributions where most outcomes cluster around some central value.² The chart below — which roughly follows a power law distribution — shows that most
Essays
This is a slight revision of an idea I blogged about here. Here’s something they don’t teach at school: the simplest way to become a better thinker is to take whatever you think is right and ask if it could be wrong. Put another way, if you’d