Silicon Valley comes to Tech City

November 21, 2011 by Leave a comment

On Saturday, I was able to attend a great event arranged by Sherry Coutu and Reid Hoffman called Silicon Valley comes to Tech City, which is part of an initiative that Reid and Sherry have been doing for a number of years (mainly at Oxford and Cambridge). It really was valuable to hear a bunch of very experienced people coming in from the US talk about many of the issues and challenges for start ups, and it is fair to say that it is pretty rare to get that calibre of entrepreneurial class in the one place at the one time in the UK. A few of the notes I took from Reid’s keynote speech:

  • Startups (or perhaps entrepreneurs or both) are about inventing and reinventing;
  • Ideas are incomplete and mistargeted; and
  • When you start, lots of things are broken – you need to focus on the problems in the right order.

As we are working on a bit of a pivot in the business, it was particularly good to attend the session discussing pivoting (or even just starting again). Given what we are looking at at present, it helped to be able to reflect on some of the things that they said. In the army, this very much goes along the lines of the saying “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” I particularly liked the view of Jeff Clavier and Jon Callghan to think big; this view echoed the thoughts of a friend who runs a VC-backed company as he and I discussed funding ideas for Carbon Voyage who basically said I should side-step angels and go straight for the big boys. On Jon’s blog, he reflected that there were many good things happening here and noted that they regularly given some consideration to heading over to this side of the pond to develop some opportunities – which I think would be a great move. I think a mix of the US VC willingness to accept more risk, combined with the perhaps more resourceful, tenacious, and creative entrepreneurs would be a great combination. Now that we have a presence in Australia, I am wondering where we need to be based as a business, and as much as I love the UK, I start to wonder whether I need to consider the US or even Asia given perceived access to capital.

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Funding, silicon roundabout Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Australia and Sustainability

November 17, 2011 by Leave a comment

As the Greenest Government ever decided to wreak havoc on the solar industry at the start of last week, the Australian Government last week finally passed a bill through the Senate imposing a carbon tax starting at approximately £15 per tonne. Of course this has not been without its detractors, but I do hope that the funds raised do get used to promote and support the use of more sustainable technology – once the price is right, these things are more efficient (as well as being good for the environment), and from a capitalist perspective, allow for improved profits.

The scheme itself is a good idea, but as with the debate about shipping emissions recently, or indeed airline emissions, that has fired up some interesting debates between the EU and the US, then the whole thing will fall down unless there is a degree of global consensus on this as Greg Hunt mentions in The Australian. So perhaps, as the following clip suggests, they might be a part two to the whole story!

 

 

And next week, I’m looking forward to attending the press launch of some UNEP reports in the lead up to COP 17 which should be rather interesting – perhaps a well placed question about global consensus wouldn’t go astray!

Filed under Shipping, Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

The Greenest Government Ever – maybe not…

November 8, 2011 by Leave a comment

As a conservative voter and environmentalist, I was really delighted to hear David Cameron make this particular pledge around 18 months ago, which was a far cry from some of the unfortunate rantings back in Australia. The intervening months have seen some good and some bad things come from the government, as the Guardian nicely shows in their green-o-meter. Many people will realise that any environmental credentials and plaudits have been fairly well obliterated perhaps as highlighted by an open letter written by Solar Century. For a government that talks so much about big society, it has failed to look at the big picture. No one can question that these tariffs needed to come down; doing this so quickly will dramatically ruin the solar industry and be completely detrimental to efforts to reduce fuel poverty, and of course efforts to reduce the carbon impact of energy needs.

So why am I, who is involved in the transport industry, starting off this post talking about solar stuff you may ask. I think ultimately the key issue here is about government’s role in supporting efforts to reduce climate change, and particularly bringing in new technologies. Sustainable technology often needs government support to help pump prime industry as sometimes there is a very long return on investment period, and sometimes emerging technologies cost a lot to start with. When I was involved in the Suststainable Development Commission’s Mobility 2020 work, this was one of the key things we looked at where it was going to be critical for governments do major procurements to help bring down the cost of technology. From an economic perspective, this shouldn’t be about long term subsidies, but rather financial support that reduces over time, otherwise it is unsustainable (although certain industries do have long term subsidies that have particular political imperitives attached to them). I would highly doubt that other industries would accept a cut to subsidies within six weeks, particularly midway through a review period of subsidies. I do hope the government backtrack on this, but it will forwever tarnish any good work that they have done to date.

Filed under General, Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

IBM Sustainability Summit 2011

November 3, 2011 by Leave a comment

Watching an empty train roll past yesterday morning while I waited to get on my way to a meeting gave me some pause for thought to consider the IBM Summit I attended on Tuesday in central London at 8 Northumberland. Unlike the event last year which was completely focused on transport, this had a wider series of topics being discussed, many linked to getting consumers to be more sustainable. There were a number of breakout sessions and workshops focused on questions around getting people to act in more sustainable ways, and some specifically linked to transport, for which the consensus was that it was crucial to challenge the norm of behaviour.

As with other more general sustainability events, it was a good opportunity to reflect on what we do and what some of the challenges are that we need to consider in overcoming in order to act/ be more sustainable. The key transport breakout session was around the topic of liberalising travel information to help people go greener. This is important, but at the very heart of the matter is the issue of pricing – until sustainability and pricing are linked, then it is going to be difficult to get the behaviour change necessary to really achieve great things with sustainable transport.

This morning, I attended an event put on by the Committee on Climate Change discussing UK shipping emissions, which was particularly interesting in terms of highlighting that transport-related emissions are going to become a greater problem over time as it is left behind energy in priority. It is clear, as they suggested, that this issue does need to be addressed, but it does not come without difficulty. I fear that a key stumbling block will of course relate to getting some form of international consensus on how to deal with this through the International Maritime Organization. It sort of reminded me of a Monty Python short video played on Tuesday by Mark Earls, one of the speakers at the IBM summit (shown below). Fortunately though, as one person highlighted today, it is in the best interests of the shipping community to reduce costs which will hopefully reduce carbon emissions anyway!

Filed under Events, Sustainability, Technology, transport, Travel Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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