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
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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
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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
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Photo by Adeolu Eletu Preface Venture capital (“VC”) found me through entrepreneurship. In fact I knew nothing of it until I came across the blogs of early-stage investors Fred Wilson and Paul Graham. At that time, I was reading everything I could find on startups and technology. I had a
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Available on Netflix If you’re a startup founder, artist, investor, or anyone working on something hard, you’ve got to watch the HBO/Netflix documentary about Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre. It’s not just about the music business either. The 4-part series is an extended biopic about two
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This is a sample chapter taken from my career skills book Graduate Entrepreneurship. You can purchase a copy on Amazon or Book Depository. Please refer to the book for references and sources of key statistics and data. Image Source Myth 1: You need a great idea Everyone has a business
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This post originally appeared at the MBA Blog of Said Business School. In Trinity Term one of my favourite MBA electives was the Nature of the Corporation. In this course we asked, “what’s the purpose of a corporation?”, “do companies need to have a clear purpose?”, “how many corporations
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In 1942 Howard Hughes set out to build the world’s largest aircraft, the Hughes H-4 Hercules. With a wingspan close to 100 meters and a weight of 180,000 kilograms, it was questionable whether the gigantic bird would ever take off. The Hughes H-4 Hercules – 2 Nov 1947 What’
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In my final year of University, I managed to go out 2-4 times a month (in terms 1 and 2), co-founded and run an entrepreneur’s society where I acted as the Vice President and despite maintaining a fairly active social life and being involved with organizing numerous society events,
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Many generations ago, the work ethic of successful rice farmers in Southern China revolved around the following proverb: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.” We are all familiar with other similar proverbs, among them, the well known English saying: