Market commentary
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Commentary Suspended
I'm going to be concentrating on my current portfolio for a while so I'm reluctantly suspending my market commentary. Normal service will be resumed once things (and the markets) have calmed down. Might take a while.
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On the Bounce
2021 has seen a bounce-back in venture equity investment. Some of this is post 2020 COVID related but is there something else going on?
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Social Innovation
Innovation has helped us ameliorate the pandemic but the social distancing response may be our downfall. As the world struggles to emerge from the pandemic, arguments rage about whether we can beat it or just learn to live with it. Whatever happens with COVID-19 one thing we can be sure of is that it will not be the last pandemic.
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Investing in Stealth Mode
Down rounds appear to be more frequent in recent months. But surely down rounds regularly occur, even in “normal” times? Half a year on from the pandemic starting to hurt the economies, evidence has emerged that the number of down rounds is definitely increasing.
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Scale Up or Cover Up?
Investing in fast growing scale up businesses that generate over 100X is the stuff analysts dream of. Yet it can so easily all go wrong, no matter how deep your pockets are. Cast your mind back to 2012 and imagine that you’d been offered the opportunity to invest in a technology business that was changing the way people and businesses work.
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Unfortunate Unicorns
Unicorns remain the ultimate achievement for entrepreneurs and investors alike. But away from the kudos of joining this exclusive club, are such goals the best target to aim for?
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Too Late for the Gold Rush ?
With smartphone sales stagnating and social media in the news for all the wrong reasons, it seems we’ve fallen out of love with technology. But isn’t innovation always in vogue?
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Virtual Not So Real
Not so long ago virtual reality was heralded as the next new wave. James Carmeron’s entirely virtual epic Avatar remains the top grossing film of all time. But how real is this new wave? A recent report by respected analysts IDC called out the emperor’s clothes – virtual reality (VR) headset sales were down a massive 33% in one year. So what is going on?
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Does AI Sometimes Mean Artificial Illusion?
Artificial intelligence is a current hot topic for investors but much of what is hyped as AI may not be all that it seems. Hype is a term often seen around disruptive innovations and Gartner penned the hype cycle a couple of decades or so ago in order to describe the different stages (“peak of inflated expectations”, trough of disillusionment”, “slope of enlightenment”, “plateau of productivity”). More recently, analyst Davey Jose at sombre bank HSBC modernised the picture, using terms like “hype mania”, “backlash” and “real application”.
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Quantum Supremacy
A few weeks ago Google announced that it was close to achieving “quantum supremacy”. Maybe the machines are about to take over. Actually, Google has just made the next stage quantum computing chip (called Bristlecone) that has 72 bits. John Martinis, who heads Google’s effort, says it’s “pretty likely” that the new chip can achieve “quantum supremacy.” But what does this mean?
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Why Investing Isn’t One Dimensional
Investors usually focus on buy price, exit price and perhaps how long in-between the two. But we may be looking in the wrong direction altogether. Earlier this year, Forbes magazine ran a headline declaring that we’ve come to a pivotal moment for investors, particularly for those in innovative businesses. The article pointed out that some events stand out as watershed moments such as Bill Gates writing his “Tidalwave of the Internet” memo in 1995 or Steve Jobs holding up the iPhone in 2007. So what was this earth changing event?
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Execution Trumps Inspiration
Many factors influence startup business success but is there one overriding factor? Evidence seems to point that way.
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Will Europe overtake the US for Tech?
Earlier this year Forbes updated it’s list of the most successful tech companies. Europe is larger, more populous and arguably more creative than the US. Yet why do we still not match the US for tech?
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Should Interest Rates Interest Tech Investors?
So the BoE has finally signalled its intent to return to normalised monetary policy and raised interest rates. It’s accepted that it will not have much effect on the incoming spike in inflation - caused mainly by exchange rates – but may well have a detrimental effect on already fragile economic growth. Adding this to the headwinds of Brexit, does this signal danger for the tech investor or opportunity?
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Why Is Smart Money So Valuable?
Early stage businesses and investors argue more about valuation than anything else. But is that the right conversation to have?
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How Long is Long Enough?
In a couple of years’ time, the world will be marking the 50 years anniversary of the first moon landing. Arguably mankind’s greatest technological achievement, Apollo represented the pinnacle of societal endeavour and technical advancement. The legacy of the US’s ambitions spawned numerous technologies and a culture of can-do innovation. Many argue that we are now too short term in our outlook. But is this true for investors?
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Post Brexit – Tech Blues or Blue Sky?
UK tech is the best in Europe, but does Brexit pose a threat or opportunity? In recent years the team at London’s Tech City has produced a healthcheck of technology across the country, called the Tech Nation report. Even if you take some of the findings with a pinch of political salt (Theresa May wrote the Foreward), there does seem to be good news for the UK tech investors.
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Biggest may not be Best
The brightest stars get most attention but are unicorn company returns quite so fabulous? Tech market analysts CB Insights keep a track of the world’s unicorn companies – those private companies valued at more than $1billion. CB Insights reckons that there are now 183 such companies worldwide, with a combined value of $657bn.
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Firework or Flop?
Selecting technology that’s going to change the world can be as simple as not choosing those things which don’t work, don’t get attention or simply flop. As the 2016 year end approaches, more people will be buying more technology than ever before – but there are losers. A brief look at some of the largest tech flops of all time could yield insights on what’s to come.
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ARMing for Innovation
Within weeks of the UK’s Brexit vote, Japan’s Softbank announced that it had agreed to acquire the darling of the UK tech scene – ARM Holdings - for £24bn. At a stroke, not only is this the largest purchase of British innovation but also removes the independence of the last of the UK’s “super unicorn” (i.e. >$10bn value) company. With the acquisition has the outlook improved – or worsened – for UK innovation?
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Would I Lie to You?
After his pivotal role in the war at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing was considering the almost unlimited potential of his fully programmable computer machines. He foresaw the extreme extrapolation from the crude number crunching computers of his day to the future where perhaps a machine would be appear to be of the same intelligence as a human.
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Visioning Our Future
In 1984 Apple aired a TV ad that introduced the Macintosh. The ad borrowed from Orwell’s 1948 vision of Big Brother and featured a rebellious athlete throwing a sledge hammer into the status quo. The catchline ended ‘…and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984”’. Apple revolutionised the way we work with computers but how many other visionaries have had such an impact? Recent work by GoBankingRates points the way.
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Worn Out Wearables?
Ever since we realised that computers were really getting smaller, pioneers and visionaries have been trying to make them wearable. As far back as the 1975 Pulsar produced the first watch calculator and in the mid 1980’s these devices were in their heyday. Of course more recently, there has been a surge of smart watches but even Apple has failed to make a device that has really caught public interest.
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Expecting the Future
When a new CEO starts with an organisation or project he or she often has a “90 day plan”. When particle physics researchers at CERN started a project in 1991 to share information, they forgot to have such a plan and introduced the internet into a brave new world. As we’ve reached the 100th “90 days” since that launch, how does the Internet cornucopia stack up against Pandora’s box?
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The Innovation Champions League
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor has just released it’s latest report on entrepreneurial behaviour and attitudes. It’s an impressive piece of work – almost a quarter of a million interviews across 100+ countries with countless institutions and academic establishments contributing. And they’ve been doing it for 17 years so it’s a well established and objective process. It shows how well the UK is doing – and why innovation is key.
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Bulls, bears and unicorns
Is the market turmoil making it harder for innovative companies to IPO – or providing opportunity? In March 2014 King Digital, the makers of the hugely popular Candy Crush game, launched it’s IPO. All the signs were good and the market was in stable bull territory. However, in the first day prices tumbled from the IPO guide at $22 to less than $18. For a $7bn company, it was the largest IPO failure for a tech business for some years. The stock further declined to $12 over the next few months. Yet today, those early investors may be thinking how smart (or lucky) they were when others are losing their heads. So what is going on?
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Innovator of the Year
The Christmas season is seeing the usual increase in online shopping activity as each year the impact of the internet eats more in our lives. According to reports from McKinsey and more recently the Boston Consulting Group, the Internet sector contributes 5.5% of the GDP of developed economies. Which country ranks top in terms of innovation and internet impact? Not the US – somewhere closer to home.
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Evolution of the Unicorn
Forbes magazine runs a yearly Midas list – a set of 100 venture capitalists, investors and commentators who apparently have the knack of turning otherwise ordinary investments into gold.
One of the consistent names on the list is Bill Gurley. You’ve probably not heard of him, he works at Benchmark, one of the many Silicon Valley VC firms. However, Bill has some notoriety as recently he’s been talking about the rise – and imminent fall – of unicorn technology companies.
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The More the Merrier?
Crowdfunding is coming of age but choosing the right route can be an issue. How can you be sure that the crowd does know best? You know when a sense of maturity is approaching a market when suddenly a number of review sites spring up. So it is with crowdfunding.
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Why Some Bubbles Burst
Nick Woodman is one of those rare breed of golden geese that have made more than $1bn through a technology innovation. In Nick’s case (he founded GoPro in 2002 to take action surfing shots) it wasn’t that he even made a technical breakthrough – he simply took existing technologies (firstly 35mm film and then digital cameras) and used them in a new and disruptive way. GoPro was once the darling of investors but why did this tech hit a bad wave?
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Disruptive is the New Norm
Investors like disruptive businesses because they can potentially lead to outsize returns and the term has been around for a while now – it was first coined by Clayton Christensen in 1995. But how do you identify the winners?
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Keeping Control
One time Harvard Business Review editor and now general contrarist Nicholas Carr argues that much of today’s technology imprisons rather than liberates users. In his book, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, he argues that the invisibility of our high-tech snares gives us the illusion of freedom.
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Inventing Innovation
The respected Boston Consulting Group surveyed 1,500 senior global executives and discovered that innovation is consistently amongst the top three priorities for their companies. Such results are not surprising, given that innovation is seen as the key means of staying ahead of competitors. Everyone likes an inventive organisation but where do the best ideas come from and can you build-in innovation?
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Wearing Thin
Apple became the largest publically traded company just over three months ago so there’s been a lot of expectation around it’s recent Spring Forward event. Many of the announcements were as expected – the iPhone6 is enjoying phenomenal success with customer satisfaction at an incredible 99%, the new 12” Macbook is only 2/3 the volume of the earlier 11” version and so on. However, most of the mainstream news centred on the Apple watch. But despite the frenzy, are wearable technologies a solution looking for a problem?
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Technology Takeover
This month Apple reported a net profit $18bn, topping ExxonMobil’s previous quarterly record of $15.9bn in 2012. And if this wasn’t enough, the record profit was a huge 37 per cent up on the previous year. Apple has now shipped more than 1billion iPhones, iPads and iPods. With Apple posting the largest ever corporate profit, is technology ready to become the lead sector across the globe?
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A Vintage Year?
The Business Insider publication has a bit of a reputation for putting together lists as well as choosing 14 as its favourite number. So this year we’ve had The 14 Trends that Will Make Someone Billions of Dollars and The 14 Best Companies and so on. But the latest list – The 14 Most Exciting Tech Launches in 2015 - are leaving some lukewarm and it seems that we’ll have to find the next big thing from elsewhere.
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It's life Jim but not as we know it: How to Make Science Fiction Reality
Is the science fiction of old really making it into reality? The lure of big prizes seems to be making a difference. The X Prize Foundation has in many people’s eyes done more to bring the ideas of science fiction into our everyday lives than anything else. And it’s latest milestone is more Star Trek than Star Wars.
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Revealing more than you’d Like
When you press the Like button on Facebook, you may be revealing more than you thought. The Like button was first released in 2009 and since then well over 1 trillion Likes have been registered. According to work from Cambridge University and Microsoft Research, it turns out that what people choose to “Like” on Facebook can be used to determine a whole host of personal characteristics.
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Perils of Investing in Our Own Image
Every investment note on the planet contains a profile of the management team because the received wisdom is that execution matters more than inspiration. Meeting the management team of a startup or growth company is de rigeur for almost every investor – yet it may be their biggest mistake.
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Digital Adolescence
Why is the digital generation proving the most cynical as far as mobile payments are concerned? The use of mobile devices to make payments is not new (think Africa) but it wasn’t until April this year that the UK launched Paym. According to the Payments Council, these sorts of transactions will become second nature. Yet the very people who should be adopting this (15-25 year olds) are apparently the most reticent. What’s going on ?
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