A campfire in the dark forest
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A campfire in the dark forest Uncategorized

A campfire in the dark forest

When I posted that I'd started blogging again, Andy Thornton posted a link to an article he's written called "Into the Woods...". It's a really interesting piece and made me pause to reflect. I wondered why I stopped blogging and using social media so much a few years ago. In my head there were many reasons - a different routine, different responsibilities a lack of time and so on. But one, if i'm honest was that I was scared. The 'woods' in Andy's title refers to the Dark Forest theory which I first came across in in Liu Cixin's books.…
Paul Miller
11 June 2023
Healthcare and tech for good startups Uncategorized

Healthcare and tech for good startups

The FT has a piece today about how tech for good startups are working with the NHS during the coronavirus pandemic. There are a bunch of BGV portfolio companies mentioned as well as a few quotes from me. It's been amazing to watch the DrDoctor story play out: "DrDoctor automates appointment bookings, cancellations and referrals for more than 30 NHS hospitals across 20 trusts. Within hours, the team had started building digital tools that would allow hospitals to broadcast in large volumes about changed and cancelled clinics as all non-essential appointments were put on hold. At the same time, they…
Paul Miller
6 April 2020
Some good stuff from 2018 Uncategorized

Some good stuff from 2018

In many ways it’s been a horrible year. The slow car crash of British politics, the gradual uncovering of how badly the tech sector has misjudged ethics and privacy concerns, the growing evidence that climate change is worse than we thought and the ongoing disaster in the White House have made for a year of depressing news. I hope all those things get better in 2019, but as it’s New Year’s Eve I thought I’d go through a few personal good things from 2018. Food and drink My favourite meal was in a small neighbourhood noodle and dumpling place in Hong…
Paul Miller
31 December 2018
Drinking problems (and some solutions) Uncategorized

Drinking problems (and some solutions)

Image by Samir Weres. Some rights reserved.“It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”  “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”  “You ask a glass of water.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy I’ve been thinking a lot about our relationship with alcohol recently. This article in the Economist about alcohol misuse in America particularly peaked my interest. Between 2006 and 2010, an average of 106,765 Americans died each year from alcohol-related causes such as liver disease, alcohol poisoning and drunk driving — more than twice the number of overdoses from all drugs and more than triple the number of opioid overdoses in 2015. The…
Paul Miller
13 November 2018
Should we say hello to aliens? Uncategorized

Should we say hello to aliens?

It’s an interesting, and possibly civilisation-ending, question. Should we go out of our way to let other alien civilisations know that we’re here, or try to remain very, very quiet? It’s an example in Steven Johnson’s excellent new book Farsighted — an expansive sweep of all the techniques that are available today to help us make better decisions. The alien question builds on an article he wrote for the New York Times Magazine last year. It was about the projects that are searching for extraterrestrial life and those broadcasting messages in the hope of something hearing us. Over the last few years…
Paul Miller
12 November 2018
Stop hating, start helping Uncategorized

Stop hating, start helping

Image by hipxxhearts, some rights reserved.If there’s one thing guaranteed to make me angry, it’s investors hating on startups. I’ve been at Web Summit in Lisbon this week and I’ve heard quite a lot of it. Usually it’s investors talking to other investors, make a negative comment about a particular idea or rolling their eyes about a founder or a pitch they’ve heard before. Usually they do it in private but it’s also become more common in public. I’ve noticed a rise in investors posting moans about founders disguised as ‘advice’ — but really they’re just being disrespectful to the people who…
Paul Miller
7 November 2018
Be more Don Uncategorized

Be more Don

Don is about 65, has an (almost) full head of hair and wears a silver grey suit and monogrammed shirt. His ring finger is swollen from the workout it gets from the weight of his gold ring. His old mechanical watch looks out of place next to his black plastic Fitbit on his wrist. Don is not in this picture — it’s from an NHS Confederation conference in 2010. Some rights reserved.Don is the guy who works the room at a conference, quietly and effectively making new friends. He does everything by the book and it works — the book being Dale Carnegie’s ‘How…
Paul Miller
6 November 2018
Technology, networks and increasing returns Uncategorized

Technology, networks and increasing returns

W. Brian Arthur (image from Wikimedia)One of the people whose thinking has had the greatest impact on me is W. Brian Arthur, the complexity theorist and economist who did much of the original work on the economics of networks. Brian was very involved in the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico which for a while held a kind of mythical place in my mind — I read as much as I possibly could that came out of there as I realised that the work they had done was exactly what I was interested in. That led me to really try and understand…
Paul Miller
25 July 2018
Doing nothing Uncategorized

Doing nothing

Photo some rights reserved by Jes.Following on from yesterday’s post on whether nation states make any sense in the twenty-first century and the tensions caused by working out what governments should do, I was struck by Tim Harford’s recent piece about whether we’d be better off letting politicians go on holiday for longer. His argument is that in many domains — from politics to investment, medicine to central banking — doing nothing is often better than intervening: It is human nature to believe something must always be done. Yet we overrate our abilities to do it and it is awfully hard to make the case…
Paul Miller
2 October 2017
Are countries over? Uncategorized

Are countries over?

Photo some rights reserved by Raja Habib.I think it was nearly ten years ago that I hosted an event with Clay Shirky for Demos in London. Clay was talking about Here Comes Everybody, his fantastic book about the role that decentralised technology is having on society and the collected audience of wonks, geeks and innovators all nodded along in agreement to most of the things that Clay said. But part way through the Q&A, things took an odd turn and the expressions on the audience’s faces changed. Clay said that he didn’t think we’d need nation states in the future. His…
Paul Miller
1 October 2017