Bad Blood is a fantastic book and an amazing journalistic feat. The drama is still playing out as I write this with the main characters facing criminal charges and likely to stand trial this year. Like Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room it’s a brilliant set of lessons about how a company can be […]
Tag archives: Startup
Is tech for good reaching the mainstream?
It’s ten years since we began running Social Innovation Camps, the precursor to Bethnal Green Ventures. We created them because we wanted to help people use their technology skills to have a positive social and environmental impact. Our eventual aim was to help tech for good become mainstream. So how far have we come? Are […]
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 […]
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 […]
The best article I’ve read about being a CEO
I really like this article by Claire Lew about leadership. It neatly summarises what I try to live up to in a clearer and simpler way than I’ve been able to articulate. Beyond her first point “Know the purpose of your role: It’s NOT to manage”, she outlines nine principles which I think are all […]
Finding all the Tech for Good Meetups in the world
The phrase ‘tech for good’ seems to be resonating with more and more people as a shorthand for using technology to purposefully address social or environmental problems. It’s not just about use of technology by existing not-for-profits (although that can be part of it and Netsquared/Techsoup have done a fantastic job of promoting that), it’s […]
What if we all lived at the same urban density as Hong Kong?
Hong Kong (source: Wikicommons) There’s an interesting little stat in the FT today. If the whole world population lived at the same density as Hong Kong we’d all fit into an area the size of Egypt. Now of course that might bring it’s own problems but if you look at the trends, it might not […]
Can we help turn your tech for good idea into reality?
There are many great things about working at BGV. There’s watching our later stage teams reach millions of users, watching the founders grow as leaders and people, celebrating as teams raise money along the way, bringing new impact investment into their businesses. There’s working with teams during the accelerator programme as the figure things out […]
We’re hiring at BGV
The tech for good world is growing fast and we’ve decided it’s time for the BGV team to grow too. Many of the ventures that we’ve invested in already are doing very well and each time we open applications for our accelerator programme we hear from more and more founders interested in starting a social […]
Where Tech for Good Ideas Come From
A couple of weeks ago, I hosted a panel of BGV founders at the South London Tech Meetup and asked them — “where did the idea for your social venture come from?”. It turned out that each founder had a story that matched one of the three sources of inspiration I’ve heard other people talk about so, […]