Paul Miller – Page 2

Book reviews

My favourite books of 2020

It was an odd year but I really enjoyed reading. I made it through a book every couple of weeks - 26 in total - and these were my favourites. Maybe this year I'll make it to a book a week. Non-fiction Wilding by Isabella Tree - my review here. This genuinely changed the way I think about nature and the countryside. The Man Who Solved the Market by Gregory Zuckerman. A brilliantly written story of Renaissance, the incredibly successful investment firm created by Jim Simons. The problem was it didn't have a purpose other than making money and that…

Paul Miller3 January 2021

Gadgets and tools

Electric dreams

Earlier this week the UK Government brought forward the deadline for a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2040 to 2030. This is a jolly good thing. The resulting media coverage has mainly been about whether or not it's possible. My recent experience makes me think it is. We switched from a plug-in hybrid (Audi e-tron) to a full electric (Tesla Model 3) about three months ago. We don't have a charging point at home for complicated reasons (the freehold of our building is currently being sold) but it's been very easy to keep it…

Paul Miller20 November 2020

Book reviews

Underland by Robert Macfarlane

I really enjoyed Underland by Robert Macfarlane. It’s an account of his journeys to places that could be thought of as underworlds - entrances to hell - or at least places hidden from human eyes. Macfarlane is a naturalist and environmentalist. He’s also not afraid of caving or climbing which helps. But he's also one of my favourite writers - I love his tone and turn of phrase. The book starts in a mine in North Yorkshire where in one direction the tunnel heads under the Yorkshire Moors but in the other, it disappears underneath the North Sea. One of…

Paul Miller9 October 2020

Book reviews

Wilding by Isabella Tree

Rewilding has been in the news this week with the UK government's commitment to protect 30% of the country to increase biodiversity. Wilding is a fantastic place to start for people wanting to understand the theory and practice of helping nature thrive. Back in the 1980s, Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell inherited a large farm and house in Sussex. They carried on working the farm until the late 1990s but it was becoming increasingly hard. The land was marginal - it was only really half meant for agriculture. It had thick clay and was pretty hilly and part…

Paul Miller2 October 2020

Book reviews

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

I really enjoyed Morgan Housel's new book The Psychology of Money. I've read his articles and blog posts for several years and the book is a rounded summary of his approach. His starting point is that money is a very odd thing. While we try to make it 'scientific' in the investment world and in mainstream economics, it's really much more complex than any one theory or model can cope with. There's a lot of Daniel Kahneman's influence in the book as well as nuggets from the most prominent proponents of value investing. For me the best chapter is "When…

Paul Miller25 September 2020

Book reviews Impact investment

Impact by Sir Ronald Cohen

Every now and then a book comes along at just the right time. Impact by Sir Ronald Cohen is one of those books. It was written before Covid (there’s an inserted page at the beginning that references as much) but everything that has happened in 2020 just goes to strengthen the argument. Ronnie starts by telling a little of the history of impact investing - how it had many beginnings but really gathered momentum after the term was coined at a meeting in 2008. But part of the story is also about 'social investing' - a term that goes back…

Paul Miller18 September 2020

BGV

BGV 2019 Impact Report

We've just published our annual impact and learning report for 2019. Some highlights include: The portfolio achieved significant financial growth and scale of impact. Combined, our portfolio companies saw a 54% increase in revenues to £29.5m, and doubled their number of users to 12m. We made our highest number of follow-on investments in 2019 and supported our ventures in raising finance from both impact-focused and traditional firms. BGV ventures raised a further £16 million in 2019, bringing the total amount of additional investment raised by our portfolio to over £80m. In our team, 68.8% of employees identify as female (more than double the…

Paul Miller8 April 2020

GoodGym

GoodGym during coronavirus

The GoodGym team has done amazing things over the last few weeks. I'm chair of trustees at the charity and it's been fantastic to see them quickly adapt their activities to meet the challenge of operating to support vulnerable people during the coronavirus outbreak. Instead of the usual group runs and coach visits, runners have been helping people who are self-isolating with shopping and other tasks through missions. This is mainly being done in partnership with the British Red Cross who are identifying tasks but other frontline organisations can now also make requests. We've also had a group of volunteers…

Paul Miller7 April 2020

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 Miller6 April 2020

Gadgets and tools

Moving my blog back from Medium to WordPress

I got a bit fed up of Medium. There's something about the format that encourages long articles structured in a particular way. I found it very limiting and realised it was stopping me from writing anything at all. It also started to feel very click-baity to get people to pay the monthly subscription and I wasn't finding anything worth reading. So I've moved everything back to Wordpress. In case you're thinking of doing the same, I found that the best way of migrating all my posts was to open a free account on Wordpress.com and use their Medium importer. I…

Paul Miller12 November 2019