Writing

Startups and Investing

The missing middle of startup funding

There was a time, not that long ago, when starting a small business meant going to see your local bank manager. This sounds almost quaint now. A friendly person in a branch. Someone who may have known you, or at least had access to your history with the bank. You would turn up with a business plan, talk through the numbers, and ask for a loan. Maybe it was unsecured. More likely it was secured against your house, which you probably had mortgaged with the same bank. The bank knew your salary, your spending habits, your debts, your reliability. You were not an abstract risk profile. You were a person in a place, with a track record.

Startups and Investing

What gets VC funding now?

I was recently asked to join a local conference panel about what investors are looking for in 2026. The session ranged from angel and seed investing to scale-up capital, bank lending and company valuations. But the question I kept coming back to was narrower: what has changed over the last 12 months, and why does the old early-stage fundraising playbook feel less reliable than it used to?

Tech Culture

What if Europe is copying the wrong AI strategy?

A lot of the articles I’m reading about AI at the moment seem to make the same assumption: that the future of AI will require vast amounts of centralised compute. Bigger models. Bigger data centres. Bigger chip orders. Bigger energy requirements. Bigger capital commitments.

Design Practice

Did Reading Fiction Make You Better at Product Work?

A lot of product arguments are really arguments about whose reality counts.

Personal

If I Were Advising a New Prime Minister, This Is Where I’d Start

The UK does not lack talent. It does not lack good universities. It does not lack creative people, ambitious founders, world-class researchers, skilled designers, clever engineers or globally respected institutions. What it lacks is a coherent economic story.

Design Practice

What Designers Should Take From Benedict Evans’ Latest AI Deck

Benedict Evans has a useful habit of standing slightly away from the noise. For years, his big strategy decks have acted as a kind of weather map for the technology industry: mobile, media, ecommerce, platforms, regulation, capital flows, and now AI. They are not predictions in the cheap sense. They are attempts to show the shape of the system: where the money is going, what assumptions people are making, which comparisons are lazy, and where the industry may be fooling itself.