Financial institutions are already highly regulated and one could argue that at best, this has not achieved the desired outcomes and at worst has actually contributed to some of the most egregious behaviors as the clever folks in financial institutions lost sight of the end game (ie the products and services and customers that lie at the heart of their raison d’etre) and focused increasing amount of energy and talent to working the system.
And not unlike Br’er Rabbit fighting with the Tar Baby, getting stuck and then pleading with Mr. Fox not to be thrown into the Briar Patch, the large incumbent banks pleading with the regulators not to write more rules may just be a brilliant case of misdirection.
but do please, Brer Fox, don’t fling me in dat brier-patch
Of course more regulations hurt the large financial institutions, but they hurt new entrants more. And competition is a whole lot scarier than regulation to incumbents. If you want to get a sense of this, you could do worse than reading Aaron Greenspan’s take on US payment regulations. And similar examples exist across the spectrum of financial services and across the globe.
The irony is that most financial regulations are born through the desire to protect the little guy from losses, and to some extent they achieve this on one (direct) level but following the law of unintended consequences, the result to often is to create an environment where far larger risks (and losses) are incurred at a systemic level. And who pays for that? Well as we all know now, increasingly it’s all of us (including of course, the little guy.) Via government subsidies, interventions, increasing costs to maintain ever larger and more complex regulatory regimes, all of which need to be paid for with higher taxes and more importantly slower economic growth. Here the bankers are right, all these new regulations make our current system less able to produce growth which of course hits the 99% hardest. But then the bankers stop before asking for a level regulatory playing field that would pour fuel on the smouldering fire of new, innovative, disruptive entrants. Please Lord deregulate me, but not just yet.
Security theater is a term that describes security countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security…Security theater gains importance both by satisfying and exploiting the gap between perceived risk and actual risk.
Regulators (and politicians) sensing the need to be seen to be doing something about the risk, fall into a trap of creating more and more regulations hoping to protect all of us from ourselves, only to create new (almost always) more dangerous and costly risks higher up in the system. Rinse and repeat. Until these risks reach the top of the pyramid and can no longer be shuffled and redistributed. At which time, they come tumbling down on all. This regulatory theater can be comforting in the short term but actually takes us further and further away from a sustainable solution to managing financial risks in our economies.
These risks exist and cannot be regulated away. Call it the 1st law of Financial Dynamics: the of conservation of risk. And I would postulate that pushed down to the base of our economic system, these risks would be easier and less costly to manage. With a more competitive and open system, with continuous renewal through many new entrants, the end users of financial services would get better (higher quality, lower cost) products and services with much lower risk of catastrophic systemic failures. Certainly – statistically – some of these new entrants would be managed incompently. Some would be frauds. People, customers would lose money. But the costs of dealing with these failures would pale in comparison to the multi-trillion dollar, economy-crushing losses that the existing system has allowed, nay encouraged to build up.
I’ll finish with an example, take UK retail banking. Concentrated, uncompetitive, legacy. No new entrants, no competition. Metro Bank, NBNK, Virgin/Northern Rock in my opinion are just shuffling deck chairs; better than nothing I would grant but essentially no real innovation, run in the same way with (mostly) the same assets, same people and same business models that previously existed. A token nod for the industry and the government to be able to say their is new competition (much as a dictator allows a hapless opponent to run in an election…) – window dressing. And even here, look at the hoops Metro Bank (who claim to be the “first new UK bank in 100 years”, QED…) had to go through to get a new banking license… If I were Cameron/Osbourne/Cable, the first thing I would do to start fixing the problem would be to create a new “entry” banking charter. Light touch. Basically just vet the founders and investors for fitness. Perhaps make them put up a certain minimum amount of the equity and/or guarantees as a percentage of their net worth. 90 days from application to charter. Nothing more. But restrict these new banks to say £50mn of assets until they have a 2 year track record (at which point they could apply for an increase in permissible assets and/or a full license.) Then oblige the large banks to open up their core banking infrastructure via APIs – analogous to obliging BT to make available their core telecom network to other operators.
I wouldn’t be surprised if within a year or two you had 30 or 40 new banks competing in various different ways, with many different (and differentiated) value propositions. And some would go bust. And some would be frauds. But even making the (ridiculous in my opinion) assumption that they all lost all of their customer’s money, and all of this money was insured by the government, we are talking about £2bn. Compare that to the direct losses of c. £23bn on RBS and Lloyd’s alone, not even considering the contingent losses and indirect costs born by the UK economy as a result of their predicament. Of course, I believe that many of these new banks would succeed and grow and any losses would be substantially smaller than £2bn. But none of these new banks would be too big to fail for a very long time (hopefully never) and although failure of even just one of them would attract headlines and aggrieved customers giving interviews on BBC1, especially if the cause of failure were to be fraud – it would behove us to put this into perspective. To not forget the difference between perceived and actual risk. To remember that huge failure even if diffuse and “no one individual could credibly be blamed” even if more psychologically comfortable, is actually much much more damaging than smaller point failures where cause and effect are more brutally obvious.
The world’s incumbent financial institutions are deeply mired in Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, protected by regulatory barriers to entry that while not fundamentally altering the long-term calculus, have pushed back the day of reckoning only to make that day seem ever scarier. It might seem counter-intuitive, but I think we should be calling not for more regulation but for de-regulation of financial services (the real, robust, playing-field-leveling type and not the let-us-do-what-we-want-but-keep-out-any-competitors type). Competition is a far more robust route to salvation than regulation. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
The alarm on my iPhone wakes me up each morning and after turning it off, before getting out of bed I often scan my inbox and my twitter stream bringing me up to speed on the hours that I missed. This morning I got the news. Steve Jobs had died. And it shook me. And I am really sad. And I cried a little. And all of this surprised me.
I didn’t know Steve. But he made my life better. And he inspired me to have the courage to give up my safe, well-paid job to do something that is more meaningful to me. To try to change the world, if only a little.
So we started Anthemis with a mission to help build the Apple’s of 21st century finance: to bring elegance, simplicity and deep engineering to create financial services that just work and empower their users.
The world needs more leaders like him. Perhaps his passing will shock some of our other leaders into pulling up their socks and start acting their parts. Or inspire new, better leaders to emerge. I hope so.
And I will stay hungry. And foolish. And I won’t settle.
To meaningfully differentiate yourself from everyone else in the same space, you have to define the situation in the industry, segment, or category that you want to challenge. Here’s what a list of what you want to challenge might look like:
This is an area in which everyone seems to be stuck in the same predicament and nothing has changed in a very long time.
This is an area where profit performance is average—it really should be more successful than it is.
This is a category where growth is slow and everything seems the same.
Once you have a situation to focus on, describe it in one sentence: “How can we disrupt the competitive landscape in [insert your situation] by delivering an unexpected solution?”
I guess if you had to boil our mission statement at Anthemis Group down to one question,
How can we disrupt the competitive landscape in financial services by delivering an unexpected solution?”
would probably do the trick quite nicely.
Of course, our approach to answering this question is perhaps not to answer it directly but rather to seek out and support a constellation of passionate, brilliant, “what if?” thinking entrepreneurs who are asking this question with respect to specific sectors, products and geographies in financial services (banking, payments, risk management, identity, investing, etc.) and contribute our intellectual and financial capital towards amplifying their vision and improving their chances of success. For all you capital markets geeks out there, we think this approach generates (as close as you can get to) pure “alpha” in that our returns are pretty much divorced from general market movements as the impact on valuation of success (or failure) in building these new businesses far exceeds the second or third order impacts on valuation of prevailing overall public (or even) private market conditions. Clearly, our success is not guaranteed – not by any stretch of the imagination – but at least the input parameters, the choices we make, are the key drivers and within our control. (And not subject to the vagaries of a co-hosted blade pumped up with algos in New Jersey…cf my last post.)
This in our opinion is a much better set of reference terms. Even more so because it doesn’t rely on our unique genius, but rather structurally taps in to a deep and expanding pool of talented people, pursuing their own visions and goals, loosely-coupled through the ecosystem and networks we strive to nurture and grow. We don’t have to make all the decisions. We don’t have to have all the brilliant ideas. We don’t have to do all the heavy lifting. Which is certainly a relief to us and I suspect to our investors as well. If you want to take the ecosystem metaphor a bit further, I guess it would be fair to say that our position is akin to dirt in forest. Or swamp water in a wetland. ie Trying to provide a fertile and supporting substrate upon which the wonders of evolution and life can flourish and grow. Perhaps not a very sexy image, but ask any farmer and she’ll tell you there is nothing as wonderful as a field of deep, dark, steaming dirt.
And coming back to Luke’s three foundational criteria, I think it is clear to all that you can take pretty much any sector of financial services and it would emphatically tick each box. It’s an incredibly fertile environment for disruption. So you know, we’ve got that going for us. We just need to make sure we plant the right seeds.
I don’t have much invested in traditional public equity markets, just a handful of relatively small positions in my (self-directed) pension fund. I haven’t done any robust analysis but my intuition tells me that my average holding period for these positions is probably around 2-3 years, with perhaps a bit of trading (lightening up or adding to existing positions) one or twice a year. And watching the markets from the sidelines over the past month or so certainly hasn’t made me regret this modest, passive allocation. When massive, mature companies trade up and down by 10 or 20% in a period of days – with no or little company specific news, confidence in the market’s ability to set prices in an orderly fashion clearly goes out the window. Indeed, the (public) equity markets are dangerously close to losing their ability to provide one of their key benefits: price discovery. And if/when this comes to pass, there will be serious knock-on effects on their other prime (and beneficial) function of capital allocation (and providing access to capital to companies and access to companies to investors.)
The risk is that a tipping point is reached at which the traditional public equity markets cease to be relevant venues for raising capital or investing. As many people have recently remarked (Kill the Quants Before They Kill Us, Beat high-frequency trading machines by not playing their game, etc.) possibly the key driver of this trend is the relentless increase in algorithmically-driven machine trading (high-frenquency or otherwise.) Now don’t get me wrong, I am neither a luddite, nor am I fundamentally opposed to these trading strategies; rather all other things being equal I would probably consider myself a proponent. In moderation, these types of trading strategies add both liquidity and heterogeneity to the market and as such help create a more robust trading ecosystem. But recently, the equilibrium of this system has come unstuck. Anecdotally, it is now assumed that upwards of 60% of trading volumes on the main public stock exchanges are accounted for by algorithmic/machine-directed trading. On some days and in some stocks, I understand that this can be as much as 80+%.
And most of these strategies don’t involve any judgement as to the valuation per se of a company; basically, as the Onion put it so brilliantly many years ago: they are just “trading” a “blue line”.
NEW YORK–Excitement swept the financial world Monday, when a blue line jumped more than 11 percent, passing four black horizontal lines as it rose from 367.22 to 408.85.
So nobody is actually setting the price! (…or more accurately, the “price-setters” in the markets are mostly being overwhelmed by the trend-trading machines.) This does have the side effect of creating real trading and investment opportunities for on the one hand a small number of smart nimble day traders and on the other hand a small number of very long term investors (who have the luxury of having deep pockets and patience) but for the vast majority of investors (professional or private) the market dynamics and extreme short term volatility make participation more and more painful. This is particularly the case in a low-return environment such as today. Clearly execution (entry and exit points) have always been important, even to long term investors, but never have they been make or break like they have been in August: who cares if you have a carefully crafted investment thesis that predicts a 20-40% appreciation over 2-3 years in Company A when depending on the day of the week on which you entered the position, the thesis is rendered somewhat moot by a 20% swing in the share price.
And it’s no wonder that strong, growing private companies are often loathe to have their shares listed: what right-thinking CEO wants to deal with that insanity???
So what’s the solution? I don’t pretend to have an answer, but I do have a couple suggestions that perhaps point in the right direction for smarter people than I to develop into actionable plans:
design structural dampeners (through exchange rules and regulations) that limit the volume of algorithmic trading to some maximum proportion (to be A/B tested to find the optimal point – 40? 50? 60? percent?); this could also be a dynamic number, for example increasing or decreasing with intraday volatility to damp same
encourage the continued development of private secondary markets (SharesPost, SecondMarket and others) and help to develop them as real alternatives (and complements) to traditional public equity markets.
It’s really important that our global capital markets operate robustly and efficiently. In fact it’s never been more important. I believe that reasonable, robust solutions exist (or can be developed.) But I fear that the inertia and prejudices of entrenched incumbents (exchanges, banks, regulators, governments and investors) will make finding these solutions exceedingly difficult. I hope I’m wrong. Until then, be careful out there (and think about re-allocating some of your capital to the private markets; you’ll sleep better at night!)
Anthemis (Án-the-mis) is a genus of about 100 species of aromatic herbs in the Asteraceae… Nicknamed “the plants’ physician”, it seems to improve the health of other plants grown near it. (source: Wikipedia)
I was reminded the other day that I’ve never introduced Anthemis Group to the world. And our website, although not bad, definitely needs updating (we’ll get to it…) But in the mean time, I thought it might make sense to have a go at starting to explain who we are, our world-changing ambitions and our unique plan for achieving same.
As many of you know, I’ve spent much of the last decade thinking hard about how advances in information and communications technologies can enable a fundamental re-invention of business models in the financial services sector, and over the past four years I have focused my energies on figuring out the best way to go about catalysing the creation of new businesses that will drive and profit from this amazing opportunity. It hasn’t always been easy – advocating change never is – but ironically, the global financial crisis of 2008 was actually very helpful as it opened many eyes to the manifest weaknesses and diminishing returns of a financial system and actors that were finely tuned to operate in the “industrial economy” of the 20th century but poorly adapted to address the opportunities and challenges of the 21st century’s “information economy.” Anthemis has emerged out of this work and we are convinced that our approach is ideally suited to profit from the vast opportunity for disruptive innovation in financial services.
Our ambition is to build the world’s first “digitally native” financial services group: a group of companies and businesses uniquely adapted to profit from the emerging competitive landscape of the Information Age.
Anthemis Group is a holding company (think Berkshire Hathaway, DST, Naspers, LVMH…) organised around a small number of key themes and principles:
that an enormous opportunity exists to harness technology to fundamentally rethink how financial services are designed, consumed and delivered.
that a healthy, resilient and relevant financial sector is absolutely critical to the well-functioning of our economies and societies
that loosely-coupled networks and ecosystems (not hierarchies) are the optimal organisational forms in the information economy
that assembling and retaining teams of talented and passionate people is the key to building great businesses.
We’re not a venture capital or private equity fund, although clearly in some respects we share characteristics and often work closely with both; think of us as a fractal start-up – a company that deliberately seeks to connect and grow an ecosystem of complementary and vibrant new businesses by marrying patient long-term growth capital with expert operational and strategic advice.
In future posts over the course of the next several months, I will explore in more detail the themes outlined above and also dig deeper into both our operating model (we have three key operating pillars: principal strategic investments (anthemis | holdings), corporate advisory (ft advisors) and an innovative specialised expert consulting network (anthemis | edge)) and our investment framework (see if you can reverse engineer it by looking at our existing portfolio!) But today, I want to finish by highlighting a great post by Stowe Boyd (which inspired the timing of this post) titled “More Like A City Than An Army.”
In recent appearances, I have used a certain example to make a case about the openness in businesses of the future, contrasting today’s organizations with cities. ‘You don’t have to ask if you want to move to NYC’ I say. ‘You just show up, and start doing your thing, interacting with people, renting a storefront, buying things.’
‘Imagine a business where you can just show up and say, I want to work here. And you’d be engaged in the workings of the business by making connections with people.’
When I read this, it was immediately familiar: it resonated strongly with some of our thinking on how to best manifest the fourth principle above and indeed our business model in many ways adopts a somewhat analogous approach.
Cities exhibit superlinear performance, unlike businesses which are sublinear. As new employees are added to a business, performance decreases per employee. Cities are the only human artifact that break this trendline: they increase in productivity as more people move in.
So, business should aspire to take on the characteristics of cities — to the degree feasible — to break past sublinear performance.
Think of Anthemis as a city. Of our portfolio companies as neighbourhoods. And of our anthemis | edge business as municipal services and resources. The metaphor isn’t perfect of course but our structure and approach is indeed designed to achieve the superlinear performance Stowe alludes to. Before you get too excited, we’re not (yet?) in a position to let people “just show up and say, I want to work here”; I think reputation and trust filters – albeit not necessarily (just) the traditional ones – are relevant, but in terms of our starting bias, I’d say our philosophy is more in tune with this approach than the traditional talent paradigm. After all, why wouldn’t we want to embrace talented, energetic, self-selecting people. To be fair, Stowe acknowledges this potential problem and offers a potential solution:
Of course, the company would have to be organized in a vastly different way. People could ‘work’ at such a future Apple by just showing up, but they might have to convince others to let them participate on projects, or get an idea funded, or change a product’s features. (my emphasis) We’d have to have a wildly different notion of ‘management’: one that would be fully distributed in some way.
This theme is an aspect of what I call messiness-at-scale: for companies to go superlinear, they have to drop all plans to keep things tidy, and accept a state of near chaos, out at the far edge, where the power curve of innovation, creativity, and resilience is at its strongest.
Indeed, the biggest issue I see with a completely open-door policy is one of protecting the reputation and integrity of the firm – (which is really just the community of people associated with it.) Basically, the NAA (no assholes allowed) rule. But the fabulous thing is that in today’s world, it has never been easier to run this filter. Globally. Using both traditional social (old boys’) networks sure but also and much more excitingly (and more scaleable) by using the vast array of digital tools (Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Namesake, blogs, etc…ergo PeerIndex, an Anthemis company!) to build up a picture of a person’s authenticity (who they are, what they believe in, what they know and how passionate they are… (Which of course highlights how crucial it is to nurture and maintain a robust digital identity, something that is anathema to most of the corporate leaders of today…)
And if we can solve the reputation / authenticity issue, this just leaves the issue of how can you afford to pay people who “just show up.” We don’t have a fully-formed answer to this yet, but a starting point for thinking about this is: you don’t. Or framed less controversially, you provide them a substrate upon which they can ultimately earn their own way and in parallel you provide a framework by which the firm and its people can invest risk capital (time and money) into the new joiner to buy them the runway they need to become “cash flow positive”.
If this sounds similar to the general approach to financing entrepreneurs and start-ups it is not by accident. Investing in people or investing in groups of people working together on a project are fractals of the same problem set. A cynic would argue that this is just semantics and that what I have proposed aboveis effectively what any company does when it hires a new employee – essentially committing risk capital on the future expected productivity of that person. Sure, perhaps. But by making this social contract explicit – by devolving the process – making it bottom-up, emergent; not top-down – I am convinced that the resulting relationship is very different (and more robust, honest and mutually beneficial.)
So we’re working hard on putting the substrate and framework in place that will ultimately allow Anthemis to welcome all the talented, passionate, self-motivated people out there that share our vision and want to direct their energy towards building a digitally native financial system fit for the 21st century. We’d love to hear from you if you think you can help (but just remember we’re a start-up too, so please indulge us if we’re a bit uneven in our ability to engage, we know we have room for improvement in this department.)
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller
I woke up reasonably early this morning with a long list of things to do today. But given that it’s Saturday, I thought it’d be ok to start slowly with a cup of green tea and a few minutes with one of the many as yet unread books beckoning from the coffee table. So I picked up Hugh MacLeod’s“Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination”. I first met Hugh about 6 or so years ago via my friend JP, and was immediately charmed by his great cartoons and unique and brutally insightful characterisation of the “corporate world.” Sort of a grown-up’s Scott Adams…
About 5 years ago I read Po Bronson‘s “What Should I Do with My Life?” and it made an impact. Not too long after I ended up leaving a long and pretty successful career in investment banking to take a new path – one that has led to the creation of Anthemis Group and to moving our family to Geneva. If you aren’t sure you are living your life the way you’d like to, as a first step I’d say read this book. If nothing else Po is an entertaining and engaging writer and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the stories he tells.
As long as you feel inspired, your life is being well spent.
Hugh’s book took only an hour to read, but it brought back into laser focus the real reasons for which I chose the path I am now on. As he states – and all entrepreneurs know – there are a lot of times when it just seems overwhelming. But he also reminds us that that is where passion and purpose come to our rescue. Without these, we are doomed to fail. With them, we succeed even in failure. Buy it. Read it. And keep it close to your desk to lean on in those moments of doubt.
I often, ok sometimes, get asked what I look for in an entrepreneur / company founder / ceo and despite having a very clear vision of the ideal profile in my mind, I used to struggle to articulate it clearly and concisely. Then last fall I read The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life and found that the legendary Mr. Buffett (albeit in a very different context – can you guess??) – had done the work for me. With some paraphrasing and adaptation, here is what he said and what I’ve adopted as my “elevator” founders test:
When I invest in an entrepreneur, I’m going into a foxhole with this guy and he has to be the right choice. The question is, who has all the qualities that will provide leadership to the company, cause me not to worry for a second about whether anything was going on that would subsequently embarrass the company, or cause it to fail through lack of ambition or effort. When I talk to entrepreneurs what goes through my mind is essentially the same questions that would go through your mind if you were deciding who you wanted to be a trustee under your will, or who you wanted to have marry your daughter. I look for the kind of person who is going to be able to make decisions as to what should get to me and what could get solved below the line. A person who will tell me all the bad news, because good news always takes care of itself in business.
And when I look across the founders of our portfolio companies, I would definitely be comfortable with any of them being trustees of my will. As for my daughter, well they’re all too old for her anyway and besides they wouldn’t stand a chance…
Markets in compute power, much talked about by me and others are now it seems finally here (from The Economist:)
Fundamentally, SpotCloud works like other spot markets. Firms with excess computing capacity—operators of data centres, cloud providers, hosting firms—put it up for sale. Others, who have a short-term need for some number-crunching, can bid for it. Enomaly takes a cut of between 10% and 30% depending on the size of the deal. But there is an important difference: SpotCloud is what Enomaly calls an “opaque market”, meaning that the firms offering capacity do not have to reveal their identity. Thus selling computing services for cheap on SpotCloud does not cannibalise regular offerings.
Our friends at Timetric are already tracking historical spot pricing for AWS, and I hope they’ll be able to do the same for the SpotCloud historical data.
I haven’t had much time to write in the last few months, part of the unavoidable occupational hazards of building a business and a company, but I felt almost obliged to comment on the latest round of major financial exchange consolidation as the author of the 2005 “Amazonbay” video…
So what was my initial reaction? Completely underwhelmed. The question that immediately popped into my head was: “Is that it???” Is that the most exciting, most optimal path to future growth that these management teams and their armies of advisors could come up with? And if so, what next? Even theoretically, only one more iteration of the global consolidation game exists and I’m not sure anyone would really advocate for a monolithic NYSEEuronextDBCMESGXetc… So the question that still will haunt the new, bigger boardrooms is not answered but only postponed: whither future growth in an increasingly commoditized business??
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a hard question. I don’t have an answer either. But you won’t be surprised if I suggest that it is probably to be found in thinking about post-consolidation de-consolidation aimed at creating new companies focused on various horizontal layers in the stack. Indeed, if the only path possible to get to a very small handful of global core exchange platforms was this flurry of mergers, then perhaps it was not all in vain. I would accept that in this layer of the “exchange stack” there is truly economies of scale, much as for instance with core communication infrastructure.
But then I would suggest that management of these platforms then needs to focus intensely on dis-investing themselves of other layers of the stack where economies of scale are less in evidence or absent completely. I don’t want to be cynical but giving the combination of normal 20th century management dynamics (bigger is better) and the particular emotio-political aspects of the exchange business, I would be very surprised to see anything like this happen. If I were a shareholder of any of these companies my fear would be that any of the advantages that arise from these combinations are ultimately subsumed by the disadvantages engendered by complexity (in every dimension.)
Giant financial exchanges – like the giant banks – aren’t going to disappear overnight. Possibly never. But to frame the debate in this “new” vs “old” / “mammal” vs “dinosaur” context is to miss the point. There are dozens of good (and some less good) reasons why these incumbents will be very hard to dislodge, and to focus on this – while potentially entertaining – skirts around the really interesting question which is to ask: where (and by whom) will value be created in digital transaction execution and management over the the next decade or two?
I don’t envy the management teams that lead these exchanges – they are forced to operate in a highly constrained political and cultural space and having fairly recently lived through the golden age for their traditional business model would seem – at least in the short term – to have huge asymmetrical downside in terms of the world’s expectations for them. Not fun.
There are some very interesting opportunities for these giant trading platforms in the years ahead. I just think that things will have to get a lot worse first before the management of these firms are in a position to act on these opportunities and think laterally. Or should I say horizontally!
Very excited to be making my first trip to Bulgaria later this week for TISEE 2011 which we have generously been invited to co-host by Pavel and Deven of Neveq who are the brains and the driving force behind what I’m sure will be a fascinating day:
The Technology Innovation Summit: Eastern Europe (TISEE) is an annual gathering of leading technology visionaries, executives, investors, and entrepreneurs. The event is focused on bringing exposure to the Eastern European technology landscape and connecting innovative companies in the region with global leaders in these fields.
There will be a broad set of events including keynotes, interactive panels, networking sessions, and a startup competition focused on emerging technologies, with a particular focus on Financial Technology, Mobile Technology, and Online Services (social media, personalization, etc.).
There is a great line-up of speakers, panelists and attendees both local and international. If you don’t have plans for Thursday, you can still book your place and jump on a plane to Sofia Wednesday evening. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. If not, follow @TISEE2011 and/or the #TISEE hashtag on the day to follow along from home.
, lays out 
As many of you know, I’ve spent much of the last decade thinking hard about how advances in information and communications technologies can enable a fundamental re-invention of business models in the financial services sector, and over the past four years I have focused my energies on figuring out the best way to go about catalysing the creation of new businesses that will drive and profit from this amazing opportunity. It hasn’t always been easy – advocating change never is – but ironically, the global financial crisis of 2008 was actually very helpful as it opened many eyes to the manifest weaknesses and diminishing returns of a 
And if we can solve the reputation / authenticity issue, this just leaves the issue of how can you afford to pay people who “just show up.” We don’t have a fully-formed answer to this yet, but a starting point for thinking about this is: you don’t. Or framed less controversially, you provide them a substrate upon which they can ultimately earn their own way and in parallel you provide a framework by which the firm and its people can invest risk capital (time and money) into the new joiner to buy them the runway they need to become “cash flow positive”.
. I first met Hugh about 6 or so years ago via my friend 
and it made an impact. Not too long after I ended up leaving a long and pretty successful career in investment banking to take a new path – one that has led to the creation of Anthemis Group and to moving our family to Geneva. If you aren’t sure you are living your life the way you’d like to, as a first step I’d say read this book. If nothing else Po is an entertaining and engaging writer and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the stories he tells.
and found that the legendary Mr. Buffett (albeit in a very different context – can you guess??) – had done the work for me. With some paraphrasing and adaptation, here is what he said and what I’ve adopted as my “elevator” founders test:
