Start-ups

Should large companies even try to be like startups?

This post is still very much a work in progress. Since the industrial revolution, if you were interested in a career in technology, large companies were really the place to be. Apart from the perks that come with working for a blue-chip company, the scale, breadth and depth of resources available to you meant that they had a virtual monopoly on innovation. However, over the past ten years, this changed. In many industries, scale stopped being an advantage. It slowly, imperceptibly at first, … Read more…

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – Four years on

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is the book that spawned a movement, and is widely regarded as the start-up manual of choice by would-be tech millionaires. This is the book that popularised the term Minimum Viable Product, introduced the term ‘to pivot’ and espoused the concept of validated learning as the main measure of progress for tech start-ups. However, notwithstanding its success, I feel that Ries’ approach could be a bit more nuanced. Agile software development lends itself very well … Read more…

Venture funding for London tech start-ups doubles

A recent report in the Financial Times claimed that venture funding for London-based start-ups reached $1.4bn in 2014, double the amount in the previous year and twenty times that four years ago. This represents 65% of the UK’s $2.2 tech venture funding last year. Venture capital funding of London tech start-ups doubles – FT.com Clearly an impressive growth, though according to Deloitte, the UK still lags behind the US, Germany, Canada and Israel in terms of VC confidence.   The … Read more…

What are Gogoro up to?

Gogoro, a well-funded Taiwanese start-up founded by big-hitting former HTC-execs with a name plucked out of the Tech industry’s random name generator has hit the headlines this week for raising a further $100m over an initial $50m in April 2011. Its broad aim, in rather fluffy terms is to “utilize the power of mobile connectivity and data analytics to transform energy distribution and management in the world’s cities.” Additionally, it is participating in the creation of a “more intelligent and … Read more…

The Periodic Table of IoT

CB Insights, an analyst firm specialised in tracking technology companies, investors and acquisitions has pulled together a rather novel way of representing the IoT ecosystem. It presents companies, VCs, private equity firms and acquirers in a conveniently colour-coded “Periodic Table of IoT”. As in the periodic table from our days in chemistry class, the characteristics of the ‘elements’ vary as we traverse the table, in this case from the technology firms in individual verticals such as wearables, connected home and … Read more…