Pages tagged: 'Startup'

  1. On the Bounce

    2021 has seen a bounce-back in venture equity investment.  Some of this is post 2020 COVID related but is there something else going on? 

    October 22nd 2021

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  2. Investing in Stealth Mode

    Down rounds appear to be more frequent in recent months.  But surely down rounds regularly occur, even in “normal” times? Half a year on from the pandemic starting to hurt the economies, evidence has emerged that the number of down rounds is definitely increasing. 

    October 2nd 2020

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  3. Scale Up or Cover Up?

    Investing in fast growing scale up businesses that generate over 100X is the stuff analysts dream of.  Yet it can so easily all go wrong, no matter how deep your pockets are. Cast your mind back to 2012 and imagine that you’d been offered the opportunity to invest in a technology business that was changing the way people and businesses work.  

    November 15th 2019

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  4. Execution Trumps Inspiration

    Many factors influence startup business success but is there one overriding factor?  Evidence seems to point that way. 

    February 8th 2018

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  5. Would I Lie to You?

    After his pivotal role in the war at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing was considering the almost unlimited potential of his fully programmable computer machines.  He foresaw the extreme extrapolation from the crude number crunching computers of his day to the future where perhaps a machine would be appear to be of the same intelligence as a human.

    July 8th 2016

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  6. Expecting the Future

    When a new CEO starts with an organisation or project he or she often has a “90 day plan”.  When particle physics researchers at CERN started a project in 1991 to share information, they forgot to have such a plan and introduced the internet into a brave new world.  As we’ve reached the 100th “90 days” since that launch, how does the Internet cornucopia stack up against Pandora’s box?

    April 15th 2016

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  7. The Innovation Champions League

    The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor has just released it’s latest report on entrepreneurial behaviour and attitudes.  It’s an impressive piece of work – almost a quarter of a million interviews across 100+ countries with countless institutions and academic establishments contributing.  And they’ve been doing it for 17 years so it’s a well established and objective process.  It shows how well the UK is doing – and why innovation is key.

    March 17th 2016

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  8. The More the Merrier?

    Crowdfunding is coming of age but choosing the right route can be an issue.  How can you be sure that the crowd does know best? You know when a sense of maturity is approaching a market when suddenly a number of review sites spring up.  So it is with crowdfunding.  

    October 9th 2015

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  9. Disruptive is the New Norm

    Investors like disruptive businesses because they can potentially lead to outsize returns and the term has been around for a while now – it was first coined by Clayton Christensen in 1995.  But how do you identify the winners?

    July 3rd 2015

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  10. Perils of Investing in Our Own Image

    Every investment note on the planet contains a profile of the management team because the received wisdom is that execution matters more than inspiration.  Meeting the management team of a startup or growth company is de rigeur for almost every investor – yet it may be their biggest mistake.

    September 19th 2014

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  11. Why Every CIO/CTO is a Venture Capitalist

    Crystal ball gazing in the search for disruptive technologies is a favourite pastime of investors, analysts and futurologists.  Predictions range from the obvious to the science fiction.  However, a recent report by Deloitte came up with a disruptor that was not a technology at all.  They said that every CIO and IT manager should stop focussing on keeping the lights on and minimising risk and instead should think like a venture capitalist.  Isn’t this is a recipe for disaster?

    June 6th 2014

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  12. When Single Minded Works and When it Doesn’t

    Almost every investment proposition includes a section on the business team, confident in the knowledge that a team will always outperform an individual.  Teams are considered almost sacrosanct and we all seem to believe that working in teams makes us more creative and productive.  But what really is the optimum team for a tech startup and growth business?

    May 2nd 2014

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  13. Better Than Average

    Are you better than average at spotting which are the best tech investments to make?  Almost every tech investor believes that they have a particular insight or edge than make them better than the norm.  In reality, believing you’re better than average is all psychology and not based in reality at all.  However, more data from what really makes successful investors is starting to pop the self belief bubble.

    April 25th 2014

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  14. How Startups Can Avoid Failure

    Startups and small companies are the engine room of the economy.  In a report commissioned by Santander, SME’s also proved the most resilient during the recession and were by far the biggest job creators in the private sector, accounting for a full two-thirds of new UK employment.  Yet, with so much replying on startups, why is it that 90% of tech startups fail?  After years of work, real data is now becoming available.

    April 4th 2014

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  15. Making Seeds Grow

    This week the UK Chancellor announced that the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) is going to be made permanent.  You might be wondering why there’s been so much interest in simply continuing with something that’s already set up.  The reason is that whilst the big brother Enterprise Investment Scheme had been going for a while, the Seed version was a bit of an experiment.  So has it worked and what can be learnt for other aspiring tech sectors?

    March 21st 2014

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  16. Rise of the Personal App

    Recently the UK Chief Medical Officer suggested that the Government might need to bring in a tax on sugar in an attempt to address the growing obesity crisis.  Dame Sally Davies view was that obesity had become “normalised” in the UK and that potentially sugar was an addictive product.  With obesity potentially becoming the overriding medical challenge in a generation, what has tech done to help?  A new breakthrough in image processing may have the answer.

    March 14th 2014

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  17. Being Fast Moving Does Not Mean “Proceed Directly to Go”

    According to latest figures there is a record number of technology start-ups appearing not only in the UK, but in Europe, the US and Asia.  As the economic crisis of the late noughties starts to ease there’s a sense of needing to take advantage of cheap money before recovery starts to edge up pressure on interest rates.  But is there time to get a technology start-up going and proceed all the way to exit within this economic cycle?

    January 17th 2014

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  18. Wearing Your Health on your Sleeve

    Wearable technology has long been talked about and as over a day you’re likely to have your smartphone with you longer than you wear some of your clothes, some have argued it’s already here.  Certainly the launch of google glass has opened eyes to the possibilities of augmented reality.  But with healthcare being one of the fastest growing sectors, has wearable medical technology come of age?

    January 10th 2014

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  19. Rise of the Anti-Business

    In 2007 two men and a dog in Aberdeen set out to brew a new kind of beer and take on the leviathans that dominate the sector.  Roll on seven years and the self proclaimed anti-business business Brewdog has more than trebled every year, boasts 6,500 shareholders and even global drinks giant Diageo was forced into a humiliating public apology over it’s clumsy efforts to stifle them.  If this disruption can happen in an industry that’s over 4,000 years old, what does that tell us for the tech sector?

    January 3rd 2014

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  20. Why There's Still Money in Hardcopy

    A London based enterprise Lifecake has just raised a further £700k to launch its new photo sharing service, specifically designed for families.  It's their monetisation approach that makes them interesting.

    November 25th 2013

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