I’m in America so in honour of my hosts I’ll skip the ‘u’ in labour for this post. Yesterday was Labor Day here which — because I had the day off — got me thinking about what work and labor mean today. The nature of work and the way it’s organised are two of the biggest issues we face […]
Category archives: Uncategorized
Today I learned that a Dutch Baby is a bit like a Yorkshire Pudding
Image some rights reserved by Dale Cruse. We’re staying with friends in San Francisco and this morning they made a Dutch Baby. Actually they also called it a German Pancake which gave me a bit more of a clue as to what it was but as it came out of the oven I realised it’s basically […]
Go figure
I’m a terrible Go player. Perhaps that’s why I hadn’t quite understood AlphaGo until recently reading more about it in Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s book Machine, Platform, Crowd. Machines became better than humans at chess a while back as increasing computing power enabled Deep Blue and the like to calculate possible moves and rank […]
What would Michael Young do?
I’ve been thinking about Michael Young a lot recently. Not least because it’s all change at the Young Foundation with the appointment of Helen Goulden as Chief Executive there which is great news. But when we topped 90 ventures supported at Bethnal Green Ventures, I remembered that people say Michael helped to create that number […]
The genius of Parkrun
Photo some rights reserved by Darren Foreman. We’ve been told we need to exercise more for years now, but finally it seems to be sinking in. While the stats for the proportion of people who are overweight or obese are still awful and the number of people who get little to no regular exercise are nothing […]
Ten years on from the first murmurings of the financial crisis
Alastair Darling was on the radio this week talking about how he got his first inkling of the financial crisis while on holiday in France. It was ten years ago and he’d walked into the local village to pick up some croissants and a copy of the FT and he read the news that BNP […]
Tech for Good LPs
A different kind of LP… It makes me really angry to see bad behaviour in the tech industry. Over the past year, there’s been seemingly unending stream of sexism, sexual harassment, bullying, and alleged fraud. Each time a new story comes out I want to scream — tech has so much potential but it will go to waste […]
The Hunt for Vulcan
Before Vulcan became the birthplace of Mr Spock and a British bomber aircraft, but after it was the Roman god of fire and volcanoes, it was a non-existent planet. The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson is a great little book telling the story of how Newton’s theory led to its discovery and Einstein’s general […]
Shoe dogs and sweatshops
I finished listening to the audiobook of Phil Knight’s autobiography Shoe Dog over the weekend. Knight is the co-founder of Nike and was in charge there for 40 years. It’s an amazing book — possibly one of the best business books I’ve ever read — there were so many moments when it could all have gone wrong and the […]
Blockchain for good?
I decided it was time to read a bit more about blockchain. First of all I went back to the original article about bitcoin written by the mystical Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2008. It’s a pretty easy read with only a smidgen of maths and you can see why it has spawned so much thinking […]